By Jacob Sprecher

If you live in Northern California, I wouldn’t blame you in assuming that this Dean Ween interview was lined up in anticipation of Ween’s headlining set at High Sierra Music Festival. But you’d be wrong. In fact, Deaner, aka Mickey Melchiondo, in addition to being guitar virtuoso for the most revered, diverse and successful cult rock band of the last 25 years, is a lifelong fisherman, to the tune of being an actual licensed Charter Boat Captain (he runs Mickey’s Guide Service out of New Hope, PA and Belmar, NJ). So when Deaner’s publicist sent out a press blast stating that ol’ Cap’n Ween was looking to shoot the sea breeze, you kinda just say, “Why the hell not?” But I’m no fisherman. For me, it seemed a bit tricky as to taking the initial plunge. So how do you break the ice with Mickey Melchiondo when you’re not supposed to be focusing on Ween? Find a common ground…

You’re a diehard Phillies fan, right?
Massive Phillies fan, yes.

I’m a diehard Giants fan.
One of my best friends is a Giants fan. You know, I hate losing to anybody, but the Giants don’t rub me the wrong way. Matter of fact, if they hadn’t knocked us out last year, I’d probably wear a Lincecum jersey around. He’s a stoner dude; love that guy.

Do you have a hard time rooting for Cliff Lee?
Me? Hell no!

It’s funny, I can’t stand Cliff Lee. I would have a problem if he showed up on the Giants.
What scared me was [when] the Mets waived [Luis] Castillo, and when Utley got hurt they picked him up off of waivers, the Phillies, and it was like “Oh my God, I cannot root for this dude.” The only thing I hate more in the world than the Mets are the Cowboys. I can’t be nice to someone I meet with a Mets hat on; I can’t even talk to ‘em.

I was at a Phillies-Mets game in 2009 in Philly, and the Phillies blew the game. I was sitting in the bleachers and I’ve never seen that kind of animosity from a crowd.
You’ll die walking to the parking lot. I see it all the time, I have Flyers season tickets. People show up in their Rangers shit and their Devils stuff, and it’s like, “You don’t understand. You’ll die here.” A Cowboys jersey at an Eagles game is gonna get you punched in the face. Guaranteed. That doesn’t matter if you’re with your wife, or your little kids, you know?

So your obsession with fishing: Where did it begin?
It started with my father. My father was a fisherman, we had boats, we had a house down the shore; I’ve always lived on the Delaware River, and the Atlantic Ocean is right here. I picked up the ball. Even at a young age I’d go fishin’ by myself when I was younger than my son, like eight years old.

You kinda felt a kinship, so to speak, with the Delaware River when you were a kid?
Absolutely. Water in general. I will always live on or near the water.

When you were getting a little bit older, were you the kind of guy that was reading fishing magazines and Melville and stuff like that?
Yeah, I do all that geeky shit. I watch fishing programming on TV, I have 20 subscriptions to magazines, hang out in tackle shops; you know, I’m that guy.

Obviously a lot of The Mollusk is water-related; were you the driving force behind that theme?
It’s my favorite Ween record ever; I think it’s the best we’ve ever done. But it was a concept we’d had for over 10 years at that point—Aaron [Gene Ween] loves the ocean as much as I do. But a beach town in the off-season is one of the coolest, most magical things in the world. Everyone is gone. And the island where we [recorded The Mollusk] is my home turf. That’s where my parents had the house—Long Beach Island in New Jersey. And we were at the very, very south end of it, which is all preserved; it’s a nesting area for plovers. So we had always talked about like, “Man, the ultimate magical place to write and record would be down here in the wintertime.” It’s like being the last man on Earth. It’s like an outpost.

Then we did it and the environment affected us in a way that I could have never imagined. The music was just coming out of us, and I think it was an exact representation of where we were. It was a great soundtrack to being down there; big northeast winter storms at the end of an island. And it was probably the most productive writing I’ve ever been a part of in all the years in Ween. We were just churning out tunes everyday that were dark and oceanic. Not like a Beach Boys record.

There are some really cool pop moments, but you’re right, it’s pretty dark in a lot of places.
I think with Ween being musically all over the map, that was the most record of a record we ever made. It was the most cohesive thing we ever did. And the bulk of it happened in the first week or two. We wrote and recorded “Ocean Man,” “The Mollusk,” “Mutilated Lips,” “Buckingham Green,” “The Golden Eel,” all that stuff. And Aaron felt the same way, like “We’re really onto something.” We would live down there Monday through Friday, come home to our families on the weekends and go back down, and we would listen to the tapes on the way home and it was like, “Wow.” I couldn’t wait for it to come out. And I’m not very praising of our work [laughs], you know? Ultimately you were never confident about a record—but that one I really felt. Still to this day.

But it’s that same thing, to answer your original question. It’s that same magic that I like. If you have it your blood—that saltwater—and you like just being on the water everyday…I’m not exactly a model of healthy living, but it’s just so good for you spiritually, physically as well. It keeps me out of the bar at night; I get up at three in the morning when I do my charters. I’m at my boat at 5, and I’m out there and I watch the sun come up everyday, and how can that not be good for you? I’m a really good honest exhausted at the end of the day—not like drinkin’ and drugging and smoking cigarettes, you know. Being out there getting pounded on the boat all day, your whole body’s sore. I sleep hard, deep good sleep. I love it. I’m very happy right now.

I’ve watched some of the Brownie Troop, and it looks like your friend Nick [Honachefsky] really seems to know his shit.
Nick is the Managing Editor for SaltWater Sportsman. The Sports Illustrated of fishing. Nick is the man. He’s my best friend.

So you guys go way back?
No, when my fishing thing started taking off he got in touch with me. He was a Ween fan in college. He was like, “How have we not hung out?” I knew who he was. It was like a brotherhood. From the day I met him we became best friends. We probably fish together over 100 days a year… You can always tell someone that’s into it. They don’t poo-poo any kind of fishing. If there’s sunnies in the creek behind my house, he’ll go back there and throw bread with my son and love it. It doesn’t have to be a 300-pound tuna, you know? A puddle of water and you bring a rod; he’s one of those.

You’ve got Mickey’s Guide Service. Is that like a small dream come true?
You know, it’s my third year of guiding full-time, [and] as time has gone on with Ween, it’s become more important to have other things in my life. There’s a blurry line between hobby and work—that’s a precious thing. You wanna keep that, do what you love. But for years my wife would get up at 6, she was a high school teacher, and I would get up a few hours later and I would make my coffee and write and record all day. This was well into Ween, six albums into our career. If you enjoy it that much, that’s a blessing. And I found that as the band got more popular that it started to become a drag; touring started to feel like a drag; feeling like you have to write another record. It was around that time, whether it’s a coincidence or not, that I started fishing a lot more, getting serious about it. And I always wanted to get my captain’s license as a personal challenge to see if I could do it—it’s great shit to know, celestial navigation and all this stuff. It all fell into place. I realized I had an opportunity and I stepped it up.

It kind of creates a balance between profit and pleasure.
Exactly. It’s the same thing. I’m fortunate enough to do two things all the time that I absolutely love. I get paid to fish, and I get paid to play guitar, and that’s great. I’ve been approached by like five different producers to do a TV show, and I’m not sure if I wanna do it. And I tell them, I’m like, “Listen if it’s gonna be on the Travel Channel I’ll do it,” but I have no interest being on Versus or whatever. I don’t need another labor of love in my life. I’m so happy with the way things are right now that I don’t wanna fuck it up. I have over 125 charters this year, and I did about that much last year; it never was a drag, driving to my boat in the morning. When it starts to become a drag, I’ll pull back from it and find the balance.

But it’s a process. When I first started guiding I only did the river. I did small-mouthed bass, striped bass, shad, walleye, and that became a drag and it was like, “No, the ocean.” It’s way more compelling. You never know what’s going to come up on your line. So I don’t do river guiding very much, I just do it for a few weeks in April and then move to salt till the end of the season in December. And what I’ll probably do is move away from inshore fishing next year and do less trips but I’ll do tuna and marlin and mako shark and things like that.

Do you find that most of your clientele is diehard Ween fans, or do people just find you in the phonebook?
I have my own fishing forum, it’s really hard to find, and Ween fans mostly find their way to it. But they’re the most hardcore fishermen of the Ween fans, and they’re all over the world. So I get people like that. I get fanboys that have never done anything; like Brooklyn assholes on the boat that get seasick five minutes into the trip. Most people have some fishing experience. I get some newbies, but that’s my job, I’m a guide. My job is to take them and do something they couldn’t do on their own and impart knowledge on them, you know. But it’s all over the place: I’ve had marine biologists on my boat, I’ve had a fish supplier that supplies all the top restaurants in New York City, I’ve had junkies on my boats [laughs]… I do a lot of bachelor parties, a lot of birthday parties. I get a lot of women buying their Ween fan husbands charters. Which is great. It’s a great gift.

So you’re down to buddy-up with the fans?
Mmhmm. My home phone number’s on the website. There’s no secretary, there’s no go-between; I meet you at the dock or your hotel and I pick you up and that’s it.

Of the four trips you offer—you’ve got the Delaware River, you’ve got striped bass in the Atlantic, you’ve got summer bottom fishing and the fall trip—which is your favorite and why?
Right now, spring striper fishing in the river and then in the ocean. All the bait is around, and the fish are fat and they’re aggressive, and it’s your best chance of the year of catching a trophy. And it’s after just a long, excruciating winter; it’s just such a relief to be back on the water. There’s something to be said for fall fishing, too. Thousands of birds in the sky bombin’ the water, tuna fish come inshore and you’ll see them blowin’ up. But I really like it all, I really do.

But your favorite place to fish, period, is South Florida?
South Florida, specifically Key West. I have the gene. That’s where I wanna go. I’m a Hemingway junkie first of all, but you can’t beat year-round nice weather, world-class game fish right in sight of the fuckin’ land, you know.

Is there one place you have not fished, within the United States, that you’d like to give a shot?
Yeah, surprisingly I’ve never fished The Great Lakes. I come from small-mouthed bass, but our fish top out around four and half pounds. So I’d like to go up and try my hand at a six- or an eight-pounder.

Have you ever encountered anything that scared the shit out of you, where you thought, “This is it”?
Yeah, well, a lot of really bad seas. But that’s just part of it. But last spring we were striper fishing on a huge bunker school, for bait, and my rod just started screamin’, the drag on the reel started screamin’. And I saw this huge scythe, like scepter tail come out of the water [and] it was a thresher shark. Which are of the nastier… This fish was workin’ the bunker school and he took my bait. He was like as big as my boat, and we were on him for an hour and 40 minutes and sun went down—it was pitch black out there. The fish literally towed us like Old Man and the Sea-style; we finally got him to the side and cut him loose. I’ve had whale come up and spout and the boat looks like a fuckin’ matchbook all of a sudden. But it’s not scary, it just gets you in touch with your mortality [laughs].

If somebody told you could never play the guitar again, could you be content with the life of a fisherman.
Absolutely. I can feed myself. That’s one of the cool things; I always forget that. I don’t even really like to eat fish.

By Jacob Sprecher

Kid Congo Powers is of legendary status. He played guitar in The Cramps on Psychedelic Jungle and Smells Like Female; he played guitar in Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on Tender Prey and The Good Son; he co-founded The Gun Club; he was creator and president of The Ramones fan club in 1976; he’s toured a blue streak the world over, and has more stories than God. And he’s a really, really nice guy with the gumption to laugh at himself. In light of his latest release with The Pink Monkey Birds, Gorilla Rose, whose namesake is homage to an obscure artist that influenced L.A.’s equally obscure formative punk group The Screamers,  Hi-Fi Hangover caught up with Kid for a word or two.

So who exactly was Gorilla Rose?
The Screamers descended upon the Los Angeles punk rock explosion of ’76, ’77. I think they had come from Seattle, and there they had made a band out of a theatrical performance group called Ze Whiz Kids, and that turned into a band called The Tupperwares which turned into a band called The Screamers…this group of Whiz Kids were a bunch of underground actors from New York, San Francisco; some of The Coquettes, the really crazy, acid-dropping drag theatrical troupe [laughs]. So they came to L.A. in the punk era and made a big influence on the scene.

People [often] just think of The Germs…but The Screamers didn’t really make records; there’s legend of them but there’s not much evidence. They were super unique: a hard punk band with no guitars, just keyboards; a synthesizer and a distorted Fender Rhodes and a drummer and a crazy singer… And with them came theater people, photographers, fashion people, makeup artists; everyone who creates such scenes; and Gorilla Rose was one of these people.

I was a teenager at the time, and when I first moved out of my parents’ house I was looking for somewhere to crash and stay, and The Screamers invited me to come stay a while at their house, and I wound up just moving in. And around their house, which was their creative area, [were] all these people…and they were listening to lots of Nico and Neu, who in 1977 I had never heard before; the German versions of Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk; the soundtrack to Susperia by Goblin…you know, it wasn’t your standard, “Oh we’re just listening to the Sex Pistols and The Ramones,” which of course we were listening to, but there were just other elements at play in that first explosion of punk. And Gorilla Rose did artwork, and he was a performer himself, but he was always somewhat of an advisor to the [Screamers’] singer Tomata du Plenty… I was just a kid and just around, but the way I observed it was that he was really instrumental and had a sharp wit and a big influence on Tomata and the lyrics of The Screamers.

Was he a little bit older?
Well they were all a little bit older than me [laughs]. I was the young, easily influenced kid. But they were older, probably 25 or something…so old. But I saw them as something to look up to, so that experience has always just stayed with me, and set me on my way; a slightly more askew, more arty viewpoint of things; to be open-minded to more things than just punk rock.

For Gorilla Rose you hooked up again with producer Jason Ward, whom you’d worked with on Dracula Boots. What was it that brought you back?
Well, that whole chemistry of everyone together. I’ve had [this band] for several years now, and the chemistry is just so incredible; they’re spread all over but it’s worth it to me. We all get together in Kansas, right in the middle; people coming in from Seattle, Austin, Chicago and D.C. Our drummer lives in [Harveyville,] Kansas, and him and his girlfriend own a high school there that they’ve converted into their house and an artist retreat called The Harveyville Project. It’s a town of 250 people total. There’s no distraction, there’s a lot of room, he has a gymnasium where we record—it’s incredible and beautiful. No clocks going. You’re free to get lost in your imagination.

I actually met Jason through our drummer and bass player, Kiki and Ron, and he was really game, and it just worked so well on Dracula Boots. If you’ve got a good recipe you shouldn’t mess with it.

So your drummer bought an old defunct high school, basically?
It actually hadn’t been empty for too long, so it was in really perfect shape. You know, a 1940s two-story high school. I was like, “You’ve bought a mansion that just doesn’t look like a mansion. You have 20 rooms, your kitchen is the size of a cafeteria, you have a basketball court, a giant stage with lighting and bleachers, an old clock in a cage and a scoreboard.” So we’re recording in that and it’s such a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy to me. And then, of course, no extra reverb needed [laughs]… The room, the gymnasium, is really the star of the record. You can hear everything. You can even hear the squeak of the kick pedal.

Let’s talk some of Gorilla Rose‘s lyricism. “Catsuit Fruit”?
Those are some heavy lyrics [laughs]. Some heavy poetry. Actually that was just creating a mood. Kiki and Ron came up with the bass and drums, and I was like, “Oh, I just see someone skulking around in a cat suit.” But we didn’t have an idea for lyrics and I just started mentioning fruit, and it kinda became its own thing. It became meaningful.

“Our Other World”… Did you used to work at a record store down in L.A.? Were some of those stories from personal experience?
I’ve taken a lot of those lyrics from my memoirs, actually… The part about Rick James coming in the record store is completely a real story.

Can you dish a little more of that one?
One day, it was like 1977, ’78, George Clinton had a record out, or Funkadelic; one of those George Clinton groups [Parliament], and it was called Pin the Tail on the Funky but it had a donkey, like a jackass, on the cover. It was supposed to be like Super Freak, or I guess they were trying to say it was like Superman, but you could tell it was supposed to be Rick James in a Super Freak suit. And so Rick James, I guess, didn’t take too kindly to this. [So he] came into the record store—I was working on Hollywood Blvd—with some big giant bodyguard guys, and grabbed the whole stack of records and made a scene breaking them all. And then he of course had to pay for them because we could have arrested him. He was just making the show and I thought, “In the end, George Clinton is still getting the money from you.”

That whole place was just a crazy scene. It was the corner of Hollywood Blvd and Las Palmas Avenue, which was at the time a big place of male hustlers and prostitutes; there was a coffee shop there called the Gold Cup that was all homeless runaways, and so there was always something going on in that [record] store. At the same time as the Rick James thing was going on a drag queen saw there was some distraction and was trying to steal records under her t-shirt and run out the door with them [laughs]. My book is going to be just stories like that.

If you grew up in L.A., how did it come to be that you were president of the Ramones fan club if they were NYC-based?
Right as soon as their first record came out, The Ramones came to L.A. and played a lot. They played everywhere, every little club. And there was this group of people, kind of a weird group of weird disparate freaks; punk rock kids like us, old hippies, photographers, schoolteachers; there was no real defining punk thing then. The whole British invasion hadn’t happened yet, so there was just this kind of MAD Magazine crowd scene.

We followed them to every show…caravan down to San Diego and up to San Francisco… [And] it was the first time it was really easy to know bands. You could walk up to the bands, or they just walk out into the audience. It wasn’t like anything. Before that it was definitely rock stars separate from audience. The line was erased. You know, they wanted to go out thrift shopping, and record shopping, and who’s going to take them? Fans.

So I started thinking “I’ll get everyone’s address and then I can make a newsletter of what the Ramones are gonna be doing when they come to L.A. or wherever they’re going,” so I started this mail-order fanzine. They’re management and they’re record company, Sire, they saw a good thing; they could see something happening. They were very helpful, so I started getting all this free swag, and it was really cool.

So you kind of stepped into the role. It didn’t exist prior.
No, no it didn’t exist. It was the start of the whole DIY thing.

I imagine you made quite a few connections through the role.
Yeah, the connections were with people, and it really created an enduring community. I would say there’s a large handful of those people that are still my friends today. The whole idea of doing that was to, you know—we didn’t know any other people like us, who liked music like that. To me The Ramones were like The Beatles; The Ramones and Patti Smith were just everything. I found out the release date of their record and I waited in the morning for the store to open thinking “I don’t want it to be sold out!” And of course I was the only person waiting.

The Cramps?
I from a very, very young age, was really obsessed with New York. I was that 14-year-old kid telling my parents and anyone that would listen “I’m moving to New York one day!” I don’t know why. Everything I read and movies I saw, I was like “This is the place for me.” I met a bunch of other kids like that, and the whole [NYC] music scene had been going on and we just couldn’t bare the thought of being left out. So we got a $69 one-way ticket to New York on Greyhound, and five of us got a bunch of supplies, which was mostly pills and cookies, and made our way. Some of that group ended up staying there for life and some came back; one of the girls had a mission to marry Richard Hell.

But at that time we met lots of people. You just met everyone. Bands were not separate. And we met a lot of newer bands, people like Lydia Lunch, The Contortions, The Dead Boys…and it was then I saw The Cramps. That just blew my mind completely. Mixing psychedelic music with rockabilly, which right now is not such a stretch, but at the time was completely unheard of. You had never heard of anyone even think about that, and look like that and act like that. It was another big discovery for me.

I went back to L.A. and then they moved to L.A. after Brian Gregory had left the band. Some New York friends, Christian Hoffman and Bradley Fields from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, I think suggested to [The Cramps], “You remember that kid—he has a band now.” That was when I was in the Gun Club, it was like 1980 or something, so they came and saw us and I guess they thought I would be the person to be in their band, at the urging of Christian and Bradley. I had been playing guitar for one year when they asked me. I really couldn’t play very well, but style goes a long way sometimes.

Also, I’ve never got them to say it, but I really think the thing was that when I met them in New York, I was wearing this gold blazer from the early ‘60s that came from this Memphis place called Lansky Brothers, which is where Elvis used to shop a lot. And they were really like, “Ahhhh, that’s incredible.” And I think some years later when they came to L.A. that they were saying “That’s the guy with the gold blazer from Lansky Brothers!” So I really think that cinched the deal.

And how did it come to be that you later got to know Nick Cave?
Well, we knew Nick through the drug circles—no—through The Birthday Party, and we [the Gun Club] dug what they were doing. So we met them when they came to America and L.A. The Gun Club ended up moving to London after a while because we were more popular in Europe and were feeling at the time very shunned by our own country and more understood in Europe. So we moved to our land of rock opportunity and started seeing more of Nick. And then the Gun Club took one of our many breakups for a while, and The Bad Seeds were going on tour; Barry Adamson was leading the band and Mick [Harvey] was going to move over to bass and they needed a second guitarist.

And at that time I wasn’t really jiving with London so much; and really I [began] playing mostly with the Bad Seeds and they were based in Berlin, so I ended up moving over there, pre-Wall coming down. It was a very special, very great artistic scene. Because London was such a pop scene, so concerned with whatever the newest thing was, what’s in and out of fashion. So they asked me to do that, and I really loved Berlin, and I just learned a whole new set of rules for playing, or lack or rules. I’d been doing really basic, offbeat rock music, and with The Bad Seeds it was more singer-driven, more piano-driven, and it opened up a lot of ideas for me; expanded my palette.

I’m a trained player, [but] I think why The Cramps and Nick Cave were interested in what I do because what I’m doing is completely made up. I learn things along the way, but I don’t play in standard tuning, and I play by expression, really, and by feeling. So it’s kind of embarrassing a lot of the time when I’m starting a new project, because sometimes I’m just like, “Well, I don’t really know what I’m doing, but it goes like this.” I’ll dance around like a chicken to try and explain what it sounds like. Luckily I have a band right now that actually knows how to transcribe that idea.

by Jacob Sprecher

Sometimes overlooked in the grand scheme of musical hipness and underground independence amid the sparkle-flyin’  pancake flips of this here U. S. of A. is the City By the Bay, the onetime home of hippiedom, Dead Kennedy punk and Lookout pop. (Well, Lookout wasn’t technically an SF scene, but it’s close enough.) But if you live in New York, if you live in L.A., if you live in Portland, Austin, Seattle, Chicago, wherever; it would be just to make note that there’s an entire boatload of wonderful rock humanity alive and well in Tony Bennett’s heart of hearts.

The Fresh & Onlys, four pieces of psych-garage with enough pop chops to melt your arteries, are as much a representation of that  special brand of West Coast swing as any. Though together just two and a half years, the Fresh & Onlys now have three full-length LPs (self-titled, Grey Eyed Girls, Play It Strange) and a small slew of EPs (August In My Mind, etc) beneath their studded belt buckles. The latter LP, Play It Strange, enjoys this very day as its release on In The Red, and let me tell you: it’s goddamn well something to lend an ear.

In anticipation of the Fresh & Onlys official release show this Saturday at Cafe Du Nord (with Kelley Stoltz, who also happens to be releasing a shit-hot LP of his own), Hi-Fi Hangover conned lead guitarist/musical chairs specialist Wymond Miles into answering a quick batch of questions.

Hi-Fi: Why the switch from Woodsist to In The Red? Any differences in working with the two labels?

Wymond: We’re just very fortunate to have opportunities to work with labels we admire. From an artist’s perspective the labels are run quite similar, really.

I genuinely believe Play It Strange to be your most cohesive and polished work thus far, be it song structures, lyricism, production, you name it. Was any of the material in your back pocket over a length of time, or did it all come from a creative creative burst? Was there anything particularly new or special in the band’s songwriting dynamics this go round?

I think it sounds cohesive because we toured most of those songs when we were on the road last year with Thee Oh Sees. Everything was pretty razor sharp and tight when we went to record it from playing them every night for a month. We always seem to be one album ahead of the album we are touring for, i.e, Thee Oh Sees trip was the Grey Eyed Girls tour, but we had all this material burning up for Play It Strange we were more excited to play. This tour might be the same, we have another album we’re working on now and we just want to play the new stuff. Die-hards will recognize our early versions of various songs from our cassette releases, both the Woodsist Bomb Wombs and an earlier self-released cassette. Most of the tunes were written in one creative pulse awhile back, we work on songs constantly, so that initial burst feels so long ago.

Production-wise, Play It Strange seems closer to the self-titled record than Grey Eyed Girls, the latter of which was a bit more raw and noisy. Obviously the new album is not overproduced by any stretch of the imagination, but were you aiming to slick things up a bit, or did It happen to unfold that way during mixing? Were you working with anyone new in-studio through the production process?

We recorded this record at Louder Studios with Tim Green. We just wanted to try something else on and see how it fit.  See how things went outside the creature comforts of our own studios, we weren’t looking to make a glossy hi-fi record, but we did just want someone else to engineer it and handle all the technical aspects so we could just set up in a room and play the songs as we did on tour.

Tim and I both have the same tape machine so all the previous records were made at both of our homes…but the sheen that you hear has more to do with the 2-inch tape we recorded on, rather than our usual 1/4-inch.

I agree that this album is more akin to the first record, something in the song dynamics and the playfulness of it all. Also the first record we had demo versions of most all of those songs that we refined while playing live and then re-recorded for the final LP, you know, what most bands do! However, Grey Eyed Girls the songs were being written and recorded at the same time. There’s a certain pure rawness to that album, in the most honest and naked of ways because of that exposed process. It’s also a darker record than the new one. The August In My Mind EP is well worth your time to listen to if you haven’t yet, it is the strongest reflection of who we are as a band. It’s a shame EPs don’t get as much exposure as LPs. We treat them with the same fervent excitement as the LPs.

I was hoping that you might be able to explain the lyrical meaning/concept behind a few songs: “Summer Of Love,” “Waterfall” and “I’m A Thief.”

Ugh, this will require the tried and true—the art will have to speak on it’s own behalf answer. I will say “Summer Of Love” isn’t just a throwback tune to SF’s ’60s tourist nostalgia, and we were plucking that vibe in a very self-aware sort of way to describe a very modern narrative of SF. “Waterfall” isn’t about TVs. “I’m A Thief” is about thievery.

What’s your take on the rock ‘n’ roll status of San Francisco? With brief exceptions, a strong case can be made that the city hasn’t really enjoyed national recognition of a true “scene” since the punk of the late ’70s and early ‘80s. L.A. and New York are perhaps too far reaching, but, in your opinion, is San Francisco capable of putting itself back on par with cities like Portland and Austin?

The music climate in San Francisco is far superior to Portland and Austin, period. Our moment in musical history is unique, but continues along a distant winding path that has seen several genres of musical scenes emerge from it. Best not to identify ourselves with any of them but instead acknowledge our place in a greater ancestry of SF music, that if you take a few steps back, has always had a voice to offer. Everything else is just hype to push an angle to a story. Dichotomy of truth/untruth coexisting at the same time.