The 90's has become the decade of retro. In San Francisco now you can relive the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's. All that is needed is the right duds and the right retro club. Be your thing, swing, lounge, disco, classic punk or all of the above you can be accommodated. Compilation albums of the "early" 90's are already available through special TV offers.
But don't get cynical, the Squirrel Nut Zippers are not on retainer with Time/Life and they don't do any covers (although it sounds like they do). These swell cats are from the heart and are just keeping in the tradition of the scritchy scratchy records they've grown up loving. Why couldn't this have been done before? Are rock bands now not imitating the past? Isn't Greenday a Social Distortion rip-off, don't the Spice Girls remind you of ABBA, is it any wonder Pearl Jam and Neal Young share the same fans? Funny most grunge bands sound like Nirvana. Eh?
So why not? It's got a funky beat and you can bug out to it.
Goblin: How was your appearance on David Letterman? Was he nice? Sarcastic?
Tom Maxwell: He came up right after the song, he looked a little wigged out, He shook my hand and said something I didn't hear. He has a firm handshake. He seemed to be moved in some way by the performance because he looked at me real strange but not in a bad way.
Goblin: Why do you think no one's ever done what you guy's do before?
Maxwell: I don't think that's true. There's a great band from the Bay Area about 25, 30 years ago, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, R. Crumb's band. They were not a horn band but they had a great banjo and one of the best steel guitar players sense Sal Lupe. I think there's parallels to be drawn between us and Bonny Lane's band: Slim Chance, after he got out of The Faces. He just passed away and I was very sorry to hear about that, I was a big fan. He formed a band that was largely acoustical: it had a clarinet, saxophone, piano, string bass . . . they drew on their English music hall roots.
I don't know, I guess enough time had to pass . . .
Goblin: Do you think your commercial success may be atrributed to being in the right place at the right time -- with the recent Swing revival?
Maxwell: I always thought it was perfectly natural to do this and it was incredibly enjoyable. I didn't think it would translate into something giant, involving truckloads of albums. In that sense I guess you could say we were in right place at the right time. But I had no idea it would turn out this way. No one did.
Goblin: No record company people tried to market you along with a Swing Music revival?
Maxwell: Lord no. We didn't even know anything like that was going on. We just thought we'd grow it organically. We had a solid fan base. We sold tens of thousands of records and got some attention from college radio and NPR. When the first record came out I talked to Mammoth about taking it to alternative radio to really put a fire in their pants, but they weren't sure about that. Being a small label they had to focus their attentions on more realistic pursuits. When they did approach radio then it really caught on. Now everyone is looking at it in hindsight and asking us if we started some sort of revival, or are part of it -- it's pretty fatuous to me.
Maxwell: I hope we can inspire somebody. If people play rock and are tired of it, or if they hear this and are more inspired by it than something else and decide to go their own way then I think that would be great thing.
Goblin: What specific records would you recommend that people who like you and want to hear where you're coming from.
Maxwell: There's a number of reissues that I'd really recommend. But it's mostly bands in times. Like Fats Waller solo pipe organ records from the twenties. Jinko Weinhardt and Stephen Capalli's Fat Club of France from the mid thirties to the forties. Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington's Cotton Club Orchestra from the late twenties to early thirties. Fats Wallers rhythm, small band size from mid thirties to early forties. Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens from the mid to late twenties. Those are some of the most kick ass bands that were around at the time.
Some of Fletcher Henderson's bands and also any of the Calypso reissues that are on Rounder Records, of Calypso from the teens to the early forties. We're also excited about some of the Cuban bands from the forties and fifties. If anybody who likes the Squirrel Nut Zippers check these records out they'd get off on it.
Goblin: You once said that many rock bands may be "balls to the wall" aggressive, but it doesn't mean nearly as much as a sinister eyebrow raise from Fats Waller -- because he really came out of the crime element. How would you compare yourself to that? I don't think any of you were ever pimps . . . is it more about just having fun with you.
Maxwell: Fats Waller and Cab Calloway were constant entertainers. We can only struggle to do the best we can but I don't think any of us are on that kind of level. What I'm interested in is being menacing or sinister without being overt or obvious about it. You can suggest things and make it some much more creepy than just laying it all on the table. You can set up a vibe and get that feeling with minimum theatrics . . .
Goblin: They have a certain cred because of their backgrounds playing in Burlesque bars and involvement with drugs.
Maxwell: They weren't all involved in drugs, maybe they drank a lot. It has to do with what their culture was at the time and how they communicated. And that's inevitable to you and me because we didn't come from that. I can understand what they're getting across in the music. That's what I think is so beautiful about the whole thing. It's totally American and it doesn't know ago, race. or class. That a beautiful and liberating thing.
Goblin: Is it just because of the style of the music, or are you borrowing a lot. Several of the tunes on HOT sound familiar, like Put A Lid On It could almost be "Hit The Road Jack."
Maxwell: A lot of the songs I like are in minor keys like "Hit The Road" Jack and St. James Infirmary. Sometimes the chord progression can be fairly similar. "Hit the Road Jack" is different actually. Put A Lid On It is a 1, 4, 5 minor progression, there's a knoctical progression. You can change it up any way and make a melody any way you want. In that there are some similarities to songs like St. James.
Goblin: But you have a lot more variety than most rock bands.
Maxwell: Isn't that great. That's one of the reasons I'm so excited to do this because I felt like it was totally up to me and the members of my band to meet the demands and the challenges of playing your instrument better than you ever had to do with a rock band and also reflecting that kind of freedom of expression in your performing and song writing. Of course with rock you are basically in one or two modes while we're in six different modes. It has just as much energy and force as rock n' roll with twelve times the variety.
Goblin: Do you feel like you're championing something that was fading away? Like the Kronos Quartet have saved the string quartet almost single handedly.
Maxwell: Yes, sadly I do. That's an interesting comparison. I can see it that you have people who looked back at their roots, schooled themselves in that, and at the same time progressing with it and putting their own spin on it. We're not We're trying to use it as the foundation for our aesthetic palace. America's greatest contribution to 20th century art which is jazz -- this kind of jazz. It's sad to me because most of the people who did it are dead and jazz itself took a hard left some time after the war and dropped many of the tenants of this music. I don't see any reason for this music to be old, outmoded, or outdated, I see it as a perfectly living thing.
Goblin: Do you think mainstream listeners were alienated by free jazz?
Maxwell: I'm all about rhythm and melody. I do listen to some post war jazz but for the most part for me it becomes more of an academic alva-rhythmic cerebral art form, other than the gut bucket, low-down music that makes me excited.
Goblin: Would you say your appeal is inter-generational?
Maxwell: Absolutely. We've had a women in her 60's come up to us after a show and say they really liked the record and then she said her mother liked it to and pointed to this ancient women behind her. We'll have fourteen year olds come up for an autograph with their parents who also want and autograph. Or people who tell us they've loaned their grandparents a CD and they won't give it back. It's thrilling when people react like that.
Maxwell: Hell no. There's always been a contingency that can dance. Like in San Francisco there's some people who can really, really dance. Other people just go out and get happy and shake it around. That's beautiful too because they're into it. We've had hippies dances, ska dances, pogoing, jitter-bugging, volley dancing, and some crowd surfing at the outdoor radio concerts.
Goblin: Have you considered putting some 50's style, Betty Page-esque bawd House dancing in your videos, like something you'd see on Reel Wild Cinema?
Maxwell: No. But I know what you're talking about. We'd go and make our own images but we definitely want to incorporate that kind of look -- some of it is real creepy looking they way it's layed out, how people move, how the film looked.
The video for Hell was based on the Lawrence Whelk show. We came up with that for a few reasons. One, it's creepy. I've seen reruns on PBS and found something unnerving about it. It's a television show with a set, and they used different camera angles but basically the lighting was the same. Sense we only had a day to shoot the video that seemed to be the optimable environment for shooting. We just wanted to light it they best we could and play up the creepy, scary, David Lynch factor with heavy red curtains and lots of make up.
Goblin: You you think the jazz musicians of the past have a lot more discipline then the rock musicians of today? Producers are as important as the band itself now.
Maxwell: As far as the recording process goes now everything is a complete safety net. It's a safety net because the engineers are close-micking the instruments so they have as much control over the signal as possible, and at the same time limiting bleed through from other musicians and while they track everything and do as many takes as they want to get it technically perfect. What you get it a sterilized product and definitely the old musicians played and recorded live all the time and could knock out six or seven songs in a day -- which would be completely lunacy to any modern engineers and producers.
We're not quite on that level but we try our damnedest and do prefer to record songs live because we're very conscious of including the ambient room sounds in the mix. We do understand that we're not the best players in the world and some mistakes do occur but sometimes they work beautifully. We don't really notice and it has a character all it's own. If the emotional quality of the take is appropriate we keep it.
Goblin: Do you think the standard of entertainment has gone down hill, when you compare a grunge. band bobbing their hair to an all-singing, all-dancing MGM spectacular.
Maxwell: Yeah, but you also have people who were songwriters while others were singers. It was like a machine. I think there's a lot to be said for what the Beatles and the Sex Pistols did for the do-it-yourself aesthetic with writing and performing your own songs. Something we try to emulate.
Goblin: So you're the best of both worlds.
Maxwell: We try to be, absolutely because we're a product for both worlds. Something I've seen noticing lately is the flak that we're getting as a band is that critics say "You're not as good as Louis Armstrong: what are you doing playing this music?" What I want to get across is most of all there's a number of parallels to be made between musical and aesthetic revolution and natural evolution. The big lesson to be learned is people believe in the allusion of progress, how one band and sound is better and supersedes another and you're only strait jacketed playing a certain kind of music a certain way because of what your immediate aesthetic environment has been.
Because of trend spotting and the horrible way the music industry works only bands that sound a certain way are given the spotlight, for whatever reason. I know why we didn't take that path and I think it's interesting that somebody gave us a chance, as we're a band that is so diametrically opposed both in it's music and it's production to what's going on now. What I would suggest as far as the quality of instrumental stuff is maximum variety engenders excellence. Back in the day of Louis Armstrong you had a lot of hot bands playing hot music and then you had a few who really excelled and made a name for themselves. Now, we're totally unique in the musical landscape. If we can inspire people to come along, and not be mindless Squirrel Nut Zipper clones because that's just going to be subscribing to old idea of progress. Definitely there's going to be people who can blow us out of the water.
Goblin: Those comparisons are unfair. They don't criticize punk bands now for not being as good as the Sex Pistols and punk is over twenty years old. You could dismiss all of grunge because none of it is as good as Nirvana.
Maxwell: It's funny because a paradox occurs. People are talking about Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong when they never mentioned them before. They never pretended that they did anything or made any kind of contribution. Now they're speaking of them in a majoritive manner which is fine by me as long as they talk about them at all.
Goblin: Possibly, one critic who knew a little about jazz must have made the comparison and other critics who have read your press packet just repeated it.
Maxwell: I think to a certain extent if we are regarded with fear and apprehension then we are definitely on the right track.
Goblin: Do you think you might inspire rock bands to go the way of Swing?
Goblin: Can your new mainstream fans Swing Dance?