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| Interviews: Ash |
Jack Of All Eggs Rob Christiansen of Eggs, Grenadine and Viva Satellite: 4 January 1995 Done in the basement of the Music Building at American University, Rob Christiansen's first major interview - done for the first issue of our zine - took place whilst he was working on a musical with Frank Bruno of Nothing Painted Blue and Jenny Toomey of the Simple Machines Empire. No, I don't know what ever came of it (The musical. New Traffic Pattern #1 sold out.). Rob: Okay, so we got Jenny [Toomey] and Franklin [Bruno] out here and that's good, because we borrowed an ADAT machine from Velocity Girl and we're doing the piano and using a drum student from here. We're doing the basic tracks for the whole musical: drums, piano and scratch vocal, and then we're going to call in different people to come in and sing on it. I'm going to try and arrange all these different instruments to come in - bring in people I know to come in and play violins and clarinets and stuff like that. I might have to put an ad in the paper; I don't know enough people who play woodwinds, for some reason. Fritz: You should try and get the American University Symphony Orchestra to come. It's convenient. R: We can't seem to get any of them interested. F: Have you thought of doing something like this with [Viva Satellite's mock opera] Leonardo? R: Well yeah, it's all the same thing in some ways. The method [Leonardo] was done was we recorded drums and bass and just brought them to the studio and just like started layering stuff on there. It worked out that I added less stuff than more stuff; I hardly added anything for some reason. I intended to add all kinds of instruments on top of the drums and bass, but I just left them. I added some xylophone and some flute or something, but there's not a lot there. I was really glad to leave it blank for some reason. The pressure's on me now to actually arrange a violin section and stuff, and to see if I can do it. F: Well, let's get back to the beginning. Tell us about your early life: when were you born and how did you get interested in doing music? R: I'm from Massachusetts and I was born in 1970. My dad played piano and I was always interested in music. I started playing trombone in fourth grade, and after a couple years I started taking piano lessons. I took guitar lessons for a couple of years and drum lessons for a year while I was here [at AU] for school. I don't know why I decided to learn as many instruments as I could at one point. I just went around and tried to figure them out. It's fun; it's my hobby. Hal: What records did you buy when you first got into music? R: I think music's much more important than any one style of music. I was probably listening to the Muppet album a lot when I was really little, you know, and whatever. It's really funny that I'm coming back...when I was learning the piano in like, fifth grade, I'd take these old books of standards that I'd never heard and try to play them. My first home recordings were making these arrangements with piano and trombone - the two instruments I could play - of standard waltzes and things like that. I remember thinking it would be really cool to have a rock band that played these songs. It's funny, because without thinking about it, it's come back to that. The Leonardo thing is a like musical and it's like the cheesiest possible form of music - two people singing to each other and arguing. It's funny doing this musical and dealing with Frankin Bruno, who's like genius songwriter - genius in that musically, he always knows what chord to put in and technically he knows why a diminished chord sounds good. He just understands that and has a really good sense of melody. The chords and the melody are really structured well in his songs, and there's always those little wordplay/pun things that make his songwriting notable, and that's why he's so perfect for this. I guess Jenny gave him the idea, like, "You've got to write a musical," and it makes perfect sense. It's sort of what he was doing anyway. I think the rock band thing is more awkward for him than sitting behind a piano and crooning out a tune. It's funny I came back to this: bringing in people who played instruments in high school and asking them dust off their instruments so they can be in my string section. So it's all come back to that. It's really fun. I think I've recorded too many bands that want to be Rodan. I mean, I love Rodan, but I don't know. I think people hear a lot of guitars and they don't understand why. Of course, there are so many bands are always like, "Hey, let's add more guitars! You can always add more!" and that's their thing. I just get tired of trying to mix music like that, cause there's really not a lot you can do with them if there's less things or instruments with more than one timbre to them. F: What was your first "rock band" like? Or was it really a rock band? R: That's funny, because I was in this band in high school, when I was in like, ninth and tenth grade, and I think it was probably the best band I was ever in. I have 4-track cassettes of stuff we'd done, and it's so amazing. We didn't know how to play very well, but we had this thing where we didn't want anyone to get bored with our music at all, so it would always change. We weren't allowed more than four repetitions of a chord progression, and then it would have to change to something else. The tempos changed a lot, too. We were really conscious of not being a normal pop band, because at the time it was like Billy Idol and Madonna, and we were like, "No, no, we can't do that, we have to do something really complicated to keep it interesting." I saw Flower recently, and it made me really happy, because those were songs they'd written in 1988, and it has this mid-80's Homestead [records] sound to it, and it's like they're doing what I've always dreamed of, taking the four members of that first band, somehow finding them, putting them together, and saying, "We've got to play these songs exactly the way we did then," because everyone would like it. It's just so amazing, it's just something about that sound. F: So, how did you first become part of the D.C. scene? R: I was at Emerson College in Boston for two years, and I realized I wanted to move further away, and that I didn't like Emerson College. I wanted to go to school somewhere where they had recording, so I ended up with some magazine that had a listing of schools that had recording, and one of them happened to be in D.C. [American University]. The criteria was for me to find a school that didn't make you take music classes to get into the recording studio; I wanted to take science classes. I figured I already knew a little bit about music and I'd rather get the scientific end of it and bring it all together and be somewhat useful in the studio, instead of someone who knows everything about music but can't fix the machine, or someone who's all technical but doesn't know anything about music. AU is one of the few schools that had that, where the Physics department, for some reason, has this 24-track studio in the basement. It's where all the Eggs stuff was recorded, all that TeenBeat stuff was recorded there as well. The Wimp Factor 14 album was recorded there, the new Tone CD was partially recorded there, Evan [Shurak] from Eggs recorded the latest Blast Off Country Style album there. Actually, he's there right now sequencing a See-Saw single. So I was in Massachusetts, thinking, "Where's the cool place, what other city might be cool?" And I was like, well, Dischord [Records] is in D.C., that's all I knew. I didn't know anything about TeenBeat. I had one Unrest single by chance, but I didn't really know anything about TeenBeat until I got here and I met John [Rickman], the drummer in Eggs. When I moved here, I thought I'd end up not knowing anybody and not getting in touch with the people who did music, but it turns out there are in fact a lot of people - I guess, the second generation after the Dischord generation, Simple Machines and TeenBeat, and I ended up meeting all of them. I'm happy about that, because they're doing a lot. Mark's a genius at picking music that other people wouldn't otherwise hear, and even encouraging bands who wouldn't exist to exist just by saying, "You've got an outlet for it if you do something." Blast Off Country Style I think exists because of him. They're totally from outer space. I mean, it's amazing they make the music they do. On the TeenBeat Circus tour, we were with them for three weeks, along with Air Miami, Romania, and, um... F: Tuscadero... R: We weren't with Tuscadero, actually, they were on the first leg of the tour. That must have been great, though. Versus is one of my favorite bands. But what was I saying? Something about... F: Mark Robinson's a genius. R: Yeah. Blast Off wouldn't exist. Chris Callahan was off in Harrisonburg at JMU and he knew he had some friends who were interested in doing some music and he knew he could put together some package, some sort of band who could function as a band, no matter how far out it was, it could exist and have an outlet. I'm sure there are a million people who have that idea , but it never gets further than that idea because they don't know how to get it out. I mean, I'm sure anyone having an idea like, "Okay, we'll dress up in space suits, and we'll have this guy who'll stand up who can't play drums that well, but he'll learn, and the guitarist can't play yet..." In fact, when they started she couldn't play at all. I'm sure tons of people have that idea, but this happened because Chris knows Mark. And with Viva Satellite, we want to put it together and make a band. F: It's just you and Lauren [Feldsher] right now, right? R: Yeah, so far. We want to make it a band, but I don't know how to do that exactly. But a couple of days ago, Mark came up to me and said, "We're doing a TeenBeat show on March 2nd, and I want Viva Satellite to play." H: What about Air Miami, though? Isn't she in there too? R: She's not in Air Miami anymore. There have been some change-ups in the ranks. H: Who's the new bass player? R: Um, I'm not sure. F: Well, I'm doing an interview with Mark on Monday, so I'll ask him then. So you met John here at AU, but how did you hook up with Eggs? It's sort of a big departure soundwise between Bruiser and the Government Administrator and Sexual Tension singles. How did you get together with Andrew and the band? R: It's weird. The summer before I moved here, I'd made this demo tape of a bunch of songs - not a demo tape, just a bunch of songs to give my friends back home. Just a tape with like an hour of music, you know, like, "Here it is, see you later everybody." When I came here, I gave it to a couple of people I'd made friends with, like John Rickman. I'd heard the Eggs single, the Ocelot/Skyscraper single, and I think Bruiser had been recorded at this point, and I thought, "this is great, I really like this band." It was something that was new and fresh for me. Evan was joining at that point, and I wanted to get in on it somehow, and I knew they had had a horn player, and so I passed it to John, I said, "I can play trombone" - because I didn't know Andrew [Beaujon] at all - and so I asked, "Can I play trombone with them?" And John played Andrew the first song on my tape, which is like this crazy instrumental, this trombone-based, schmaltzy, swingy thing, and he liked it. John called me from one dorm to the other and said, "Andrew's here. He heard the tape and he likes it. Do you want to play trombone with us?" It was such a small band at the time, but to me it made such a big deal. And like the next week was the Lotsa Pop Losers festival at D.C. Space. So I was like, "Yeah, I'll do it. I'd love to do that." I was jumping up and down. "I came here and I'm in a band again!" I didn't realize what it was going to become. I don't know what's going to Eggs in the next few months, but I feel like whatever has happened is a success already, because I feel like I've done so much more than I ever expected to do. I feel like an old man. I feel like Frank Sinatra talking after all the years. I mean, we've been through hell. Eggs has been the toughest band in the world to deal with, personality wise. F: Yeah, I've seen Eggs about five times, and I've seen at least that many line-up changes. H: Every time you see you guys you've got a different drummer. R: I think the Eggs live show is hit or miss. It's either terrible or it's pretty good. F: The only one I thought approached terrible was the Lollapalooza show. R: Oh really? I've heard that was one of the finer shows F: It was pretty funny, but musically...you had Evan Bitner up there with the little maracas... R: That was great. That was the first show we had that Evan Bitner guy dance. He was just this guy who had a van. Pitchblende used to pay him to drive them to shows, and he'd say, "Yep, I'm back in the morning to go to work." It was a flat rate of sixty bucks, or whatever he charged. We took him up on it, and he drove us to Lollapalooza. We got him in for free, and he was pretty happy about that. It was a good day, and that was the first time he danced. F: Was that the only Lollapalooza show you guys played? R: Yeah. The next year, I guess Mark got more connected with those people. Well, Unrest did a few shows last year, and this year Blast Off toured with them. F: I think Versus toured with Lollapalooza this year. R: They might have. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. F: So what's happening with Eggs? Andrew's moved to New York, and that's all I've heard on that front. Is that going to cause a major problem with rehearsals? Is it going to be like a Fugazi situation? R: Oh, I don't know. No one's moved to Seattle. We create our own problems much faster than anyone could create them for us, and this is a perfect example. I don't know why we make it so hard on ourselves. H: Why did he move to New York? R: Well, it makes sense to me that he'd want to get out of here and go somewhere else. He's been here for a long time; this is where he landed because his parents lived here after he graduated from college four years ago. So yeah, I can see where he'd want to go to a bigger city where he doesn't know as many people and try something new. So he's there trying to get by right now, but hopefully he'll find some sort of careery thing he likes to do so he can be happier with his life or whatever. I don't know how much he likes sleeping on floors. I don't know if he's into that kind of thing too much. F: You've also got the Grenadine thing that you're doing. But that's only a part-time thing, whenever Jenny or Mark decide to get together. R: Yeah, that's whenever we decide to do something. It's generally Jenny who says, "Hey, there's two shows on a weekend, and we need something. Why don't we go do them?" The next thing we're going to do is that this guy Frank Bosco from Wimp Factor 14 is getting married and he asked us to play his wedding. So we might at that point learn all the songs again, because we tend to forget them in between. F: Mark had all the chords to all the songs written out on the back of the set list. R: There's something about memorizing which fret and which string to start playing on and then it all comes back. F: Are you getting more involved in Grenadine now? I noticed you started singing on this last album. R: Yeah! Well, I don't know. Yeah, I definitely had more to do with the second ... well no, I was there playing drums and playing with the songs the whole time. It just happens that I wrote a song this time. F: When I did my interview with Jenny for the diamondback, she told me this was the first time you'd played guitar on a Grenadine album. R: Just on my song, though, and Mark played drums. F: Are you going to be doing more of that kind of stuff? R: I don't know. I think it worked out okay, but it doesn't neccesarily make sense for me to try and write Grenadine songs. Grenadine, to me, has something to do with the way their guitars sound together because they both play weird. They each have a weird style. Mark has this old ten string Harmony or whatever. It's like a Sears guitar from 1965 - it's not a Danelectro or a Silvertone or anything, it's just this terrible guitar. It's got 10 strings on it, and I think they're the same 10 strings he's had on it since he bought it. It just has this sound to it, so it doesn't make sense for me and try to write those songs. F: So you just don't write in that style at all? R: No, I don't have a good enough sense of history to really go at that. Mark just all of a sudden decided he liked this crooner type of '20s thing. The model was actually Tiny Tim, I think. He said, `I'm really into making this the `Tiny Tim album.' So, all of his songs on that are his little hokey, strum-ey, swingy little songs. I don't really know how to do that. F: But the solo stuff you do, like the Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers track ... I don't know. Do you write like that when you write songs? R: Yeah, that's what I'm about. F: Those long, meandering, songs with 12 different changes, where the song changes styles and everything? R: Yeah, that's more me. Recently, I feel like I'm a new band. I mean this idea of me trying to push myself as a band, and me getting interviewed by myself is brand new, and it's nice because I think it's something I wanted to do. The Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers, I just decided that everybody who plays in bands plays with everybody they know, they just call it different names. I play with these two guys in Boston whenever we get a chance, and we used to call it Eighthead, or I can play songs with my girlfriend, we can play children's songs for her niece. I just decided to take everything I do now and call it Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers and I to push that as an idea. It's a lot of fun, and I feel like it's what I want to do more. F: What the hell is that Flight of Icarus thing? R: Have you heard it? F: Yeah. It's really strange. R: Yeah. It's something about really self-conscious. I like releasing songs I'm scared of myself, ones that I don't know where they came from and I'm scared people are going to think I'm crazy because they exist. That's fun to me. Like that song on the compilation ... what did I call that? F: Miss America. R: Right. That song, I just gave Mark a tape of like a bunch of stuff on it, and he said, `I want that one,' so I just said, `Sure, if that's the one you want, you should have it.' I'm scared of it. I think anyone who hears that is going to think I'm really strange, but then again, it's what I really like doing. That's the kind of music I'm into. I can't qualify what kind of music that is, but that's the kind of music I like. I guess the idea for The Flight of Icarus is, um, ... F: Well, it says on the label that it's a neo-neo-classical... R: I had this period where I wrote a lot of songs that had to do with Classicism, and there's already been Neo-Classicism, so this is my Neo-Neo Classicsm. I had songs where I would reference the Odyssey and the gods and stuff just because it was fun - fun for me, that was, not for the listener. When I was in bands and stuff in Boston, I used to try and sing as high as I could. I used to listen to Soundgarden a lot, and I would try and sing that high. I'd play my acoustic guitar alone in the basement and sing really high and try to expand my range so I could sing higher all the time. So then I moved here, and Andrew was really cool to me; he seemed like a really cool guy. He was really into being quiet and mumbling the lyrics and sort of singing low, and I thought that was a lot cooler than singing high and being a rocker. So that's the whole thing where it's cool to sing low and if you sing high you're like, a spaz. F: But he does that occasionally on Exploder, he sometimes does sing kind of high, but not all that often. R: Yeah, but he was always sort of with his mouth half open, back then it was like he was shy, but it came off as really cool to me, and to a lot of listeners. (Evan Shurak, etc. come through) F: So, is this an Eggs reunion? R: Funny, but yeah, it's true. We just decided the three of us were going to get together and play some music to see what happened. You might as well get together with your musician friends and try something. F: So what instrument do you enjoy playing the most? R: I don't know. It's doesn't really matter at all, does it? F: Well, not really, but... R: I'm not saying that's an impertinent question, I'm just saying it doesn't really to me at all, it's what's coming out of the group. F: How did you guys get Viva Satellite going? I think we've covered all the bands except for that one. R: How did we do that? Let's see ... Lauren is a musician who never played much. She's just a person who is a musician. When I met her four years ago here at AU, she didn't play any instruments but she was really into music and she had sung a lot or something. She's one of those people who bought a bass and taught herself to play, and then bought a guitar and taught herself to play. She was never in bands before, but everybody was like, `Yeah, she's pretty cool.' She was one of those people where you go, `You can't play bass, but come play bass. What the hell?,' you know. She's just really nice to have around. I was always friends with her so, I said `Let's make music together, we might as well. It's what I like to do.' F: You've got the stuff out on TeenBeat; is there going to be more? R: There are a couple of things. The first thing we did was for Happy Go Lucky Records in Cleveland. We were the second release. It was a friend of mine who wanted to start putting out records, so I said okay. He put out by a band called One Eyed Jack from Buffalo, and he did everything wrong. He pressed 1000 and still has 700 left. They broke up the day he released the record or something. Everything went wrong with that, and he was about to give up, but he really wanted to do it, so I was like, `Here. If this is any help at all, I want you to do the single.' It's really godd [for him], because by doing it he was able to get in contact with all the distributors - they know him by name now - and he knows how to deal with them on terms and how to do his business. In just the course of selling 500 of those, he learned how to do it all. And then there was my friend Brandon - I still don't know his last name. Brandon from New Jersey. Everybody knows him. He put on those shows at his farm, the Indie 500 shows. He's a great guy. He does Jiffy Boy records, and put out a compilation called "Ten Cent Fix" that that has a Viva Satellite song on it. H: That's a pretty cool song. R: The Devo Satellite one? Thanks. You guys are the only ones who my music and noticed it was me. I have this recent boost in my self confidence or something, to come out and talk about myself like this. It's actually becoming my favorite subject. F: Okay, so what do you see as the future for yourself? R: (pause) I want to make more music. In the immediate future, I want to try and put Viva Satellite together more, and I want to try and get some of my own songs released, because now I have a tape of six or seven or eight of my own songs which I think are really worth something. I'm sort of giving it around to friends and people I know who might be interested, and also to people who might be willing to taking a song for whatever reason, because I want people to start noticing that I make my own music that I think is worthwhile. If the right people find it, it would make me happy because it's worth hearing, I guess. A lot of people probably won't like it, but that's fine. F: Would you consider putting it out on TeenBeat? R: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's happened. I guess that's what Viva Satellite is. That's why the Miss America song is on the TeenBeat compilation, because Mark offered for me to put out some of my own stuff, and at one point thought he was going to do a whole album of my own stuff, but I don't know if he wants to do that anymore. I think he took the Viva Satellite single and we're doing a full album because he didn't really want to do a full album of my stuff because who's going to buy an album of this guy who's in Eggs? Yet maybe someday ... F: Do you think that helps you to be known as "The guy in Eggs" or is that a detriment? R: No, well, I don't know. It's the worst possible title, I guess (laughs). Maybe I shouldn't be thinking about. I'm opening up dangerous parts of my mind that shouldn't be opened. "The guy in Eggs..." F: Does it bother you if that how people think of you? R: I guess if that why they know me or like me- I mean, I think it's getting pretty easy to listen to an Eggs record and know who wrote which songs. There might be someone there who likes my songs and notices that I wrote them. F: Can I guess that "Willow, Willow" [on Exploder] was not your choice? R: Well, that's a cover, actually. F: I know, but to do the Arthur Lee cover, that was Andrew's choice, right? R: Yeah, but I think it's great. We really changed it around - Why? You don't like the song? F: Well, it's not my favorite song on the album, but it struck me as a weird choice ... but actually, it's not when you look at the whole band. I don't know - Arthur Lee and Love just struck me as a weird choice. R: Why is it a weird choice? F: I don't know. Okay, never mind. I'm sorry. Moving on ... R: No, I'm interested. F: It just didn't click with me that you guys would do a Love cover. I've heard the original, and I just never associated it with something you guys would do. R: Well, that's very old Eggs. It seems like we recorded it a long time ago, and it makes a lot of sense to me. The original's really dreamy, and it's a real pretty song. There are a lot of sensibilities that strike me as being old Eggs. F: Okay; `Fever'. It's one of my favorite Eggs songs. Does it make perfect sense? R: Well, that was a real quick idea. Andrew really wanted to do it, and I was like, "Well, it's a nice song..." Of course it's a classic, and I think it's a cool song. We really didn't give much thought to it, and no thought has never really been given to it. It was like, "Should we do this?" "Yes, we should do this." That's what I liked about that Jade Tree single. I like when a label commissions a single. It works out that they're commissioning art that wouldn't otherwise happen. For example, the Working Holidays series - There's a lot of stuff on there I don't like so much, and there's some stuff on it I don't like, of course. A lot of people didn't obey the rules, but Jenny and Kristin set up a specific set of perimeters, like write a song about a specific holiday. By doing that, they put you in a position where if you're following the rules, you're going to write a song you wouldn't otherwise write, and that makes more music. But back to the Jade Tree single: it was at a time when we didn't have any new songs, so we're like, `Hey, let's write some new songs for the single.' So we just started writing, and I don't think we would have otherwise. There was money to back it too. They said, `Here's $300, go to WGNS and see what you can come up with." That was our first experiment in arranging with flutes and tambourines and stuff, which we really got into later. That was great. Just lay a metronome on the tape, lay down the guitar part and build an arrangement over that, which taught me that it's a really nice way to write songs, and that what I'm doing here with the musical and with Viva Satellite. That was also the first time I was allowed to go all out and write songs, like `Sexual Tension.' That was the first really frightening Rob song on any Eggs release. F: My girlfriend really likes `In State.' R: Thanks. That song started a lot, actually, depending on which kind of Eggs you like: the downfall or the beginning of the really creative thing. F: I don't think there's really a line, except for after Bruiser. There's a definite split between that and everything after it. R: It's funny, because when I joined the band right after Bruiser, I tried very hard not to stand out. I have a tendency to play Metal guitar parts and stuff - I like that kind of thing - so the first couple of years I was in Eggs, I tried to make the horn really subtle and the guitar really subtle, but by the time we got through all the singles and recorded Exploder, it was all gone. There was no subtlety left. Some would say there's no art to it anymore. F: Are we ever going to hear a recorded version of your new instrumental Heavy Metal song? R: Yeah, that's coming out on Jade Tree. The song with contemporary influences? That's on Jade Tree - a split with Pitchblende. F: Where do you see yourself in ten years? R: There're too many things I want to do in the world. It's really frightening. I think the worst thing in the world is knowing there's a lot of things you want to do and being scared you'll find yourself being 50 or 60 and finding you haven't done them all. It sort of works the opposite of the way you'd think it would. It's not liberating at all. I'm really scared I'll be unsatisfied and won't have done all these things. I have no idea where I'll be in six months. I might move away, don't know. I think my next move will be that I'd like to get into film editing. And I think that sound mixing for films would be great. It ties together so many things I'm interested in. I've realized recently that documentary films are really good because they tie in social issues I'm interested in, and you can tie in all these technical things I've learned. I've learned about film and video and about recording sound, and somehow making documentary films applies all of that to a purpose, and it shows off a situation that could be changed, or a situation that is good, and it somehow brings it back to a level where it's a useful human job, it's not running the soundboard for the Today show, and it's not recording a punk band - which is nice, sometimes - but it's actually making a difference in a very direct way by showing people about issues they didn't realize existed. So yeah, I think that's what I want to do, and it ties it all in. There's a direction to head, but there's no way to head directly at what you want anymore, it seems. There's no way i could decide I wanted to do documentaries and just head out and do it, because I would get really frustrated, because who's going to give me the money right now to do that? I'm trying to get involved right now with people letting me score films for them, and letting me make little noises for them, they're like student films, which is fun. F: It seems like you're branching off of the mainstream music scene with this. What's your take on the D.C. music scene? R: That was going to be my first documentary, actually. I'm thinking about this right now. Something interesting is going on right now in D.C. I don't know what generation you'd call it, possibly the second generation. I'm very interested in that. When I moved here, things were sort of budding: Pitchblende was just getting going, Eggs became a lot more than we expected it to, Unrest was on its way up, Edsel, Nation of Ulysses ... I'd love to go around D.C. right now and interview everybody involved with everything and ask them a set of questions about what they think of all this. Is there a scene here? Is there any camaraderie here? Or is it too business like? And is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'd like to do it just to have the footage and decide why I was doing it in three or four years and edit it all together. F: But all the bands will break up in three or four years anyway... R: Yeah, so it could document a time period. If not, just for personal reasons. I'm just too immersed in it right now to understand what's going on. F: So what exactly is up with Eggs, if we could come back to that? R: As far as where our heads are right now, I called Andrew today and I was talking about receipts and stuff for accounting, because we have to do that. We totally lost money this year. We decided to become a business so we could do it leagally and find out if we lost money - and of course we did. I talked to him about something, and he lost the artwork for the singles compilation we're doing. F: Is that going to be Stems and Seeds? RC: Well, it's actually called How Do You Like Your Lobster? But anyway, Andrew did all the artwork two days ago because that was the deadline, and he Fed-Ex'ed it from New York and it didn't get here. So he's doing it all again, and I asked him, "Andrew, why did the artwork get lost in the mail? Didn't that happen before with our artwork?" and he said, "Oh, it's probably just the curse." I said, "Sure we have some bad luck, but I don't buy that there's a curse." And he laughed. I think we really have a bad time with it, but I think it's all problems we inflict on ourselves. F: Are you moving away from the D.C. alternative rock scene? RC: Yeah, I really don't care about pop bands so much. If there's a good pop band comes along I'll listen to them and I'll enjoy it, but I'm really glad bands like Gastar Del Sol exist, which is something new and fresh - just little sketches of things. That kind of thing is more interesting to me. F: How is that manifesting itself in your work? RC: Last night I couldn't sleep because I was think about arrangements for this thing. I just had the songs going through my head and I kept thinking of all these instruments I want to hear, and suddenly Viva Satellite songs that aren't even written yet started arranging themselves, and I started picturing how good it would be to have the actual Viva Satellite band. H: Are you finished with school here? RC:I graduated one year ago. Blair (the drummer) is a grad student here and that's how we got the room downstairs. We hope to get started on the strings and things next week, and finish sometime in January. Jenny's going to be working on it with me, but Franklin's going away, so it'll pretty much be up to me and Jenny. F: Who's doing the vocals on the album? RC: That's very interesting. We're hopefully getting a bunch of semi-celbs to sing on the album. F: Kind of like Leonardo? RC: Well, that was more of a local thing. I was actually able to get Andrew, Lauren and Ian Jones in the same room to have dialogues. This is going to be much harder, but we're going to try and get like, Craig Wedren [of Shudder To Think] and all these people to do it. Jenny'll be on it too, of course. We're never going to try and get them in the same room for dialogue things. We'll just try to get them to sing their parts. F: So, the music for this thing is basically your project? RC: Well, we'll see what I can get away with. I mean, I don't think they're going to give me free reign - and I don't think they really should. They wrote the songs. I'm going to try and assist them. I could go as far one way as, well, if Franklin played me all the melodies he wanted to hear, I would just write them out. I'd just do that, the physical work of transposing it for the different instruments and writing it out. But I don't think he's going to give me those kind of clear instructions, so I'm going to have my own control over a lot more stuff. Any way that it happens it'll be fine and it'll be a lot of fun. F: I'm trying to think of any more questions. RC: It's been nice talking to you guys. Either way, we could just keep talking. But if you're to trying sell magazines, you might want to find someone more newsworthy. H: Don't you like getting interviewed? RC: This has been a real good experience for me. It's like, "What are my goals? Oh shit, I should have some." It's nice though. I appreciate you guys noticing I'm a band. F: Or three or four... RC: But I'm not the lead player in any of the bands. F: But it's cool that you're not the lead player, but you add so much the sound of the bands. RC: That's the ultimate for me, adding to someone else's music is nice. F: When you sing, do you intentionally look at the celing or is it a subconscious thing? RC: I think about that, because I really don't want to be doing that. I think ideally, you wouldn't be watching a band, you be watching a musical where there're performers acting things out, looking at you and being as entertaining as possible. There's nothing more pretentious then a band - I mean, who wants to see four more guys playing in a band? That's the last thing I want to see. You know what holding a guitar looks like. I'd like ideally to look at people [in the audience] and interact with them, but maybe I'm too shy to do that, and so it ends up I'm looking at the ceiling. And what's more pretentious then that? |