Travis Morrison
What Do You Want Me To Say?
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NATN: So, the perfunctory question. I’m certain you’ve talked about this ad nauseam. The new album is out. What happened, what was the process in the end?
TM: Well, I guess we just kind of decided to forget Interscope ever existed and just put it out. They’ll never settle the deal, they’ll forget about it. It will never be settled. They barely never knew who we where before this merger…well that’s not true… but they fired everybody who did know us. And technically they still own this record. But they owe us money, so I think that by the nature of the corporate beast, they’re just dragging their heels…it's not even a conscious thing I don’t think, they just don’t move very fast. We’ll put out the record -- they’ll never know.
NATN: So it’s like your band is literally lost in some file somewhere at corporate headquarters and its like they forgot about you while dealing with this big corporate merger?
TM: Our A&R; guy, after we called him enough, did eventually call us to say “Well, we don’t think this is the label for you anymore, but I want to give you guys the rights, you can have the record and all that.”
NATN: Well, that’s sort of cool.
TM: Yes and no. The thing is, with any big corporation, what happens is they let the people at the top kind of gloss over things, and they let the people at the top be these kind of philosopher kings and they don’t have to do a lot of the dirty work. And then when you talk to the lawyers, suddenly it's going to take forever and there are all these weird strings -- like apparently part of the deal is that we can only sell 10,000 when we take this record to a minor label. You want to figure there gotta be some kind of business reason, like at 10,000 then they get the record back or start making money, but its just like "No, you can't sell 10,000."
NATN: Do you think it’s because they want their name associated with anything that sells over 10,000, or what?
TM: I think it's just because they don’t want to be embarrassed if were suddenly on the cover of some magazine as the band that they screwed, which has definitely already happened a little bit…
NATN: Well you were on the front page of the Washington Post for that!
TM: Yeah. The last thing they want to see is us getting big with this record on an indie label and then licensing it to another major label. It seems like they wouldn’t have made it this far thinking that way, but I don’t know. Stuff like that, its hard to say, a lot of times there’s just no reason whatsoever (laughs). I’m serious -- it just happens that way. And if you make a big enough stink about it, “ they go “Oh yeah, never mind,” and they don’t hold you to it.
Every week our lawyers tell us "I think in a couple weeks everything will be settled," and after a while it's like, "life’s too short, I guess they can sue us." And they might get all our money (laughs). And a big advantage of them suing us is that they owe us $50,000 -- the advance on our second record. As David and Goliath stories go, we have a fair amount of negotiating power. I think eventually there will just be a sort of mutual forgetting that the deal ever existed.
NATN: So you don’t think you’ll ever see the $50,000?
TM: No. I think its kind of an unspoken trade, and again, with companies this big, its not like there’s anybody thinking this way. I think it's just how they do business: They’d rather forget about things and we’re quite happy to go along in our own little underground way with some of these bonuses, like this album that they gave us money to record, as long we don’t nag them about the money. I think that’s naturally how big companies work. Nobody thinks it out, it’s just like an organism. Ya know, but it would be nice if the lawyer called us tomorrow and said, “look I got the money.” .
NATN: Is the fact that it was released on an indie label rather than a major going to affect sales?
TM: I don’t know how you mean. We never really had a relationship with a major label.
NATN: So does it make a difference? Would they promote it a lot? Like send it out to radio stations?
TM: No! They have no idea who we are!
NATN: Were you expecting certain things from a major label? How would it affect the status of the album?
TM: Yeah, yeah. But you know, only recently have things come about. I’m not sure we could have done it without things like email, internet, and mail order for records, there’s no such thing as not finding a record now -- you can go to Insound and order it. That takes away a reason to sign to a major label -- which is “I can’t find my record in stores” -- well, you don’t need to go to a store! Just get a credit card! And if the stores don’t order it, their loss. They’ve gotta kind of figure out what people want to buy. I don’t think it was going to be like “Yeah, we’re going to have a tour bus” -- I’m still driving the van. Or the subway.
NATN: No Lear Jet?
TM: In some ways (actually I’ve used this metaphor before a couple times), it’s like you kinda have this weird relationship with somebody and you kind of sit around the house too long with them and they’re kind of nuts and then one day they just kinda run off and you’re all messed up, and after a while you get on your feet and think “You know what, maybe I’m actually better off without that crazy person I used to sit around the house with.” Maybe you kinda start to make your own way and find that more satisfying. And then the though of you getting back with that person is [awful]. And that’s very much like the major label -- it's almost like narcotics -- and now there are actually opportunities available to us to make our selves improve our lot by our own hands in ways that wouldn’t have been possible with a high-bound record company, which all major labels are.
NATN: That’s a weird phenomenon -- it seems like getting on a major label is an end for so many bands, and kind of hypnotizes you to think that’s where you want to be, but in reality, you're not doing any better by it.
TM: Exactly. Our morale kind of dipped in the last year -- we couldn't avoid the feeling of rejection, but that really didn’t last very long. I think it was interesting how this type of thing will break a lot of bands up, just because it makes them look really hard at their values and what they want to accomplish and then realize whether or not they want to be in a band any more. But a lot of bands didn’t break up, and I think that shows that a lot of bands went through the same process we did where we where like “Wait a minute, we can control our own destiny! Thank the Lord!”
NATN: But of course that’s a really hard thing for a lot of bands to survive through. I don’t know if you can pinpoint Jawbox’s demise to that, but it happened right after they got dropped by a major label. It seems like it gets right to the heart of a lot of confusion and galvanizes people and they start thinking.
TM: Well, it's tough. a band is so much a social construct and it's hard to keep four people keyed into one thing. It's hard enough to keep myself geared into one thing, much less four people and with an event like getting dropped from a major label, it's like, “Well, we’ve been kinda cruisin along doing this for a while and I’ve had this really traumatic event -- how badly do I want to be here?”
And in Jawbox’s case, there were other things which were interesting to members of the band -- like [drummer] Zach [Barocas] went to film school, [guitarist] Bill [Barbot] went to do Internet stuff. Their decision to break up was because of a dialogue that was precipitated by being dropped from a major. They didn’t break up because they were dropped from a label, they broke up because they were forced to think about what they want to do. And in our case it could have happened, but I guess we’re suckers -- gluttons for punishment!
NATN: I thought Desoto was kinda taking a step back and not putting out new albums and then I guess they took on this project -- what’s up with that?
TM: Well, it wasn’t really the label that kinda busted [Jawbox bassist] Kim [Coletta]’s stuff -- she tried to manage, and managing sucks. To be a good manager you have to be a jerk, you have to want to spend all day on the phone getting something for someone else. That’s all you do, and managing indie rock bands is the worst of all, because they don’t make any money! If you’re going to tend after somebody’s life, it might as well be a rich person!
NATN: More funny! Or else how can you eat!
TM: I’d have to kill for a sandwich! Kim was doing really well as a manager, but it’s a really thankless task. Kim for so long has been such an incredible facilitator for Jawbox, and as a manager of a label, and I think the initial announcements were overblown that she was getting out of music, but it was necessary because she had to kind of dynamite everything, and then look back and say “OK, what about it did I value?”
And now she’s working with a select group of people I think she considers herself close to, and its definitely scaled back to a hobby. Kim is such an energetic maniac that her hobbies are probably more involved than our jobs. It’s still a pretty good deal, definitely. I think she gave a shot at being a rock industry professional, but the only people she’d want to work with would be indie rock people who would never make her a dime and that’s a tough thing to do.
NATN: Are you guys at the point were you’re pretty much thinking about the next album again?
TM: Oh God. Yeah, we’re writing again. You know, you take it step by step. The new material is all really disparate and hasn’t come to any real direction. It all involves more samples, I guess more involved melodies. I know one of the new ones is just chattering away like the old style. But we're not really [thinking about the new album], we have a lot of touring to do. We didn’t write a song for like a year. It was a really long time. It was like “Honey, we’re making love again!”
After the label, we were saying “Do we want to do this? Do we want to take time off?” I think stylistically, we had reached a plateau. And growing artistically is like endurance sports - your first couple of improvements are where your times drop by like a minute, and you're improving so fast, and then after a while you have to work very hard to get like half a second off your time. So it took us a while to realize we weren’t going to make quantum leaps like we had been doing every time without actively working at it. The kind of improvement we did was possible as a garage band, but to go farther we have to zero in and actually work hard and I think we’ve started to do that. For all of us it was a realization that you have to get really good.
NATN: Do you think you’re all moving artistically at the same pace?
TM: No. We never do, though. There’ll be an interval where any one of us is completely slack and somebody else is concentrating really hard and improving really fast, and then that person scares the other people, and they try to get better, and they search their soul… Yeah, it always varies. I went through a period where I improved drastically as a singer because I really practiced at it -- last year before we recorded the record -- and then when I was about to get were I wanted to be as a singer, I just stopped practicing. But I’ve started practicing again. We could all be more disciplined about it, but it comes in waves… I don’t know how to eat this asparagus.
NATN: You can pick up asparagus by your fingers -- that’s OK.
TM: Yeah? Rock and Roll.
NATN: Isn’t that easy, I think I’ll have one too... OK, you’re gonna hate this question. But what’s the emergency? There’s the tour, the Promise Ring album, your new album -- what’s this all about?
TM: I don’t know, I don’t know. It happens -- you get these weird moments of synchronicity with other bands. I came up with that name like a year and a half ago, and when we heard (the new Promise Ring album) was coming out, we were like “Oh my God, our album has to come out first -- this is ridiculous! They recorded their album last summer, we recorded our album two summers ago, and they beat us!” But I have no idea.
NATN: You got written up in Spin and some decent publicity, do you think that has anything to do with your being on Interscope?
TM: No, but that actually has been one of the best things that have ever happened to us. It was like “media interest?” I was joking with somebody the other day that we’re going to be mentioned in completely irrelevant articles: “Despite the fact that Dismemberment Plan was dropped by Interscope, they feel that the East Timorese should rule their own country.“ It could be like a random-ass story mentioning “Despite being dropped by Interscope, Washington D.C.’s Dismemberment Plan loves bruschetta!” The stories are just never about us. I don’t know, maybe we should just wish more calamities upon ourselves, maybe we should get the government on our tail.
NATN: So I guess you would consider a new deal with a major, if publicity weren’t even a factor.
TM: It would have to be radically different then what major labels are based on today. So many details of the deals where mind-bogglingly low. We were going to get 14% of the profits. We had two guaranteed records, and then they got the next six, and they handled it record-by-record if we weren’t dropped.
Basically, the evil of major labels is that when they feel like they wanna keep things you’ve done, they say you’re an employee. And when they feel like they don’t owe you anything, they say you’re a contractor. So you don’t get health benefits because you’re a contractor, but they’ll keep the albums because you’re an employee. We saw this and didn’t do anything, that’s the incredible thing. It's like ”How did this happen? Did they feed us amyl nitrate?”
I feel like there’s a lot of things we could do for ourselves that a major label wouldn’t even think of doing. We could put out singles or put more into online ordering services which should then encourage them to stock more records. We could do things without a lot of the overhead and time the major labels require. For the kind of record sales we could ever possibly have, we would never be million, billion dollar stars, so we should probably stay in a situation where we do best. I mean, I don’t think a major label would know how to sell us -- we’re a deeply eccentric band.
But there are a lot of deeply eccentric people out there, and we probably know how to get in touch with them better than a major label. So I just realized “I want the money!” No, that’s not it, that’s not it at all. I just feel like a lot of time was wasted dealing with a major label, and I’d rather go in my basement and work on a song or design T-shirts or something like that and I feel that will have more long-term payoff.
NATN: So to continue with my fragmented line of questioning, [Emergency & I producer] J. Robbins seems to have his hands in a lot of good albums these days, what’s the appeal?
TM: Well, you like to work with people who are artists because they understand you -- “Nobody listens!”
NATN: He knows that you only eat the brown M&M;’s, right?
TM: Yeah! I get there at 6 O’clock in the morning and there he is, picking them out. He’s a relaxed guy, very funny and he makes me sound good.
NATN: He’s fun at a party…
TM: You can take him anywhere. He doesn’t embarrass me like the other producers. He was enormously helpful for me because he knows a lot about pitch and the physical craft of singing. I promise you after bands work with him, they improve dramatically. The guy from Braid, Davie from Promise Ring, I know I did, some of the other people he worked with -- he just knows a lot. People think singing is such a metaphysical act and it makes people feel uptight. You have to get to the point where you're not nervous about it, and he’s really good for that. He teaches you all sorts of stretches and breathing exercises to do and regimens…
NATN: When I think of Jawbox, I think of the drastic improvement in J.’s singing on that last album. His singing was nothing remarkable before that last album, but suddenly it became like another instrument. So he imparts his wisdom?
TM: Also, you’ve gotta understand… He understands where we’re coming from. He’s a bigger XTC fan than I am -- he buys the box sets, I don’t buy the box sets. And at the same time he loves Big Black or whatever, the history of songcraft, and he’s also interested in making an un-holy racket which is really in line for us.
On one hand, we can listen to a song on the radio, a complete top-40 piece of trash, and say, “Yeah, its really well put together, its really interesting” -- and then we can pop the Circus Lupus or whatever -- so I think he’s definitely on our wavelength. And a lot of times, you either get one or the other -- you can get someone like Steve Albini who really wants to capture the performance, but it doesn’t really do the song a whole lot of justice sometimes, and you end up with a lot of talents that you just don’t connect with. Or you end up with somebody that kind of wants to take over the sound… and he wants to get both, and that’s definitely one of the reasons why we’re with him.
NATN: So what’s been going on at your shows recently with screaming girls sitting in the front row? There’s definitely a sort of sexual tension at the shows -- is it from your hip thrusts on stage or something?
TM: What is this hip thrust stuff?
NATN: You don’t see all those girls down in the front?
TM: No! What are you talking about? I’m busy, I’m trying to remember the chorus! People keep bringing this stuff to my attention more and more, this stuff about sex. Something about me moving around like that -- I have no idea. I don’t know about the hip thrusts, it sounds like a medical condition! My doctor says I have to drink more milk. I don’t know. I certainly love those weird guys that come to our show dressed up -- one is named Ryan Kidwell -- he’s like a boy genius. He just did a remix of one of our old songs, it’s really good. And then some guys I don’t know very well. One of them didn’t know our music at all, but his friends did, and were like “Dude, we should get dressed up for this band we go see,” and the guy was like “Alright!” The first time he ever heard us was at Ft. Reno, now I guess he likes us.
NATN: That show was very confusing with the costumes and everything,
TM: You think you were confused!
NATN: I guess the audience wants more colors, anything to look at.
TM: I do love old pictures of old P-Funk shows with like 25 people on stage -- you’re trying to pick out the ones with the instruments.
NATN: Its like the Onion article out now: “Ska band outnumbers people in audience.”
TM: That’s almost as good as “Area Bassist Fellated”! At the Baltimore show, those guys showed up in matching white short-sleeve dress shirts, black skinny ties that stopped mid-chest, wrap-around sunglasses, black trousers -- and I’m like half really psyched and half really embarrassed. It’s hard to make a call. We’ve empowered the crowd, but maybe we should disempower them!
NATN: There’s a fine line you can cross when you want to break down between the audience and you.
TM: Yeah, let's build that wall back up again! I think in the end I like it. I think we’re lucky to have a following that comes to the shows and are very creative. You can't be thankful enough for that. At some shows, they’re kind of thinking more than we are. You have to kind of be on point -- they’re showing up in costume, you can't not show up. It would be an insult. These people create these outfits to wear to the show and you can't be [slacking] while that’s happening. Whenever I get embarrassed about it, some hipster kid will come up to me and be like "Who are those guys?” and I’ll be like “Fuck you.”
NATN: That is pretty cool, because in D.C., you don’t really find a lot of creative response at shows from the audience.
TM: Yeah, but you know what? I was thinking about that - have you seen Instrument, that Fugazi movie? I watched the footage of the early Fugazi shows where the band's on stage and there’s like five people and one guy's wearing a tutu... It’s like this crazy scene, and there’s people dancing everywhere just really losing their minds. I don’t know. I think punk got more popular, I think…
Punk was always based on an outsiderness, and when it actually began to get more popular, it wasn’t really deserving of an outsider status. I think a lot of really weird mind games began to set in between performer and audience. I think the community kind of freaked out when punk started to get more popular and started to get this kind of weird Maoist mentality. Nobody wanted to get caught saying or doing the wrong thing, and that ended up with environment where nobody did anything.
It affected the music in the city too. Punk in D.C. was getting really stale a couple years ago. I think it was that weird "cooler-than-thou" thing. Punk wasn’t originally cooler-than-thou at all. It was very much about geeks. If you look through band books -- they are all complete dorks! And originally, it was about people who had out-in-left-field ideas and wanted to express them, and once it became more culturally visible, it started getting dominated by an exclusionary mentality rather than an inclusionary mentality. So I think that was a very specific period in time where everyone was really awkward.
NATN: Are you going to blame it on anyone? I’ve heard people blame it on Nation Of Ulysses.
TM: That’s pretty good.
NATN: What do you think about that guy Vortex Man who wants to “break up the Make-Up”?
TM: Who?
NATN: He goes to all the Make-Up shows in a wrestler's outfit, he even flies to Make-Up shows, trying to challenge Ian Svenonias to wrestling matches.
TM: Vortex Man? What does he do at the shows?
NATN: He yells at the band. And sometimes all his friends will dress up so it looks like Vortex Man is everywhere waiting to wrestle Ian.
TM: Oh my God! That’s hellish! Wow.
NATN: Apparently he’d been treated rudely at a show by Ian, and he’s been on a mission to break them up.
TM: What kind of revenge is this? He’s driving home saying “I’ll show him!” In some ways, it’s kind of funny. I’d be interested to here what Ian has to say about it. I can see it lining with some of his philosophies about art and expressions, but it’s a little much when it’s directed negatively towards you all the time. I love the part about his friends dressing up the same way…. I always thought everybody blamed all those problems on them.
I always thought Ulysses were very empowered, I always thought they were unfortunate because they didn’t think people liked the idea, it was a joke, they where fooling around -- I thought that they would like crowds to go crazy, but they I think they may be a little more intelligent than the people who come to their shows, too high-minded. I do think they leave people paralyzed, because they’re not really sure what this is. Kind of like the dumbass, unaware interpretation of what they’re about, it really convenient for people that wanted to be in a little club, but I don’t think that’s them really.
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