So, tell me who you are and what you do!
ES: I'm Eli Schmitt, that's E-L-I-S-C-H-M-I-T-T, and I play drums in TV Buddha.
JR: My name is Johnson Rockstar and I play rock and roll guitar.
Can you tell me why you are here in town this weekend and describe what happened last night?
ES: We're in town because we played a show last night with Horsegirl and Godcaster at the Hancock House and it was really awesome. It felt really nice to play a show we actually felt proud of in New York. I feel like a lot of times we end up coming here and circumstances just arise where it's like you don't feel that good about the set. But I felt really good about last night and it seemed like people were really into it. Godcaster was great and Horsegirl was obviously so good.
JR: It’s the best venue in New York. It was great playing a place that felt like Chicago or even like, it could happen anywhere in America. Not necessarily a house so nice, but just a house show in a living room like that. It was like something that doesn't really happen here [NYC].
ES: It was really not clout chase-y at all. It felt really like people were just nice and wanted to hang out. It was really refreshing.
You played a lot of brand new songs last night, it was a lot that I hadn't heard before. But the whole set was… it didn't sound the same as the way you record. Is there any intention behind making the recorded music one way and then playing it completely differently?
JR: Well, most of the songs we played haven't been released yet. They've all been recorded though, for our next release. But it's definitely going in a somewhat different direction from our EP that we put out last year. But in general, I've always believed in a separation between the recorded and live aspects of a band. Because to me, if you're doing the same thing in both, you're not utilizing either to its full potential. Because there's so much you can get out of a recording that you can't translate live, and there's so much you can get out of a live experience that you can't put into a recording. So why try to make them the exact same? They should be different. The recording is definitely a lot bigger, but the live version is very stripped back and direct to the point, which I think is the best way to play a rock and roll show.
ES: Yeah I think it kind of came in response to– We were playing the songs that were on the EP for about a year and touring with them and it was a lot more of really avant garde and slow stuff. But we really wanted people to dance to our songs and we were like, “Why aren't people dancing?” So I feel like the start of that was being like “Oh, what if we just like sped up Baby Woah?” And then it was like, “Oh, we could just do this with so many songs.” It feels really good to be able to play at this velocity.
I was going to say when I saw you guys in LA, you played “Baby Woah!” pretty straight to the recording, slower and with Tom Henry in tow. But last night it was just like– everyone was jumping up and down and it was great…You’ve cited The Velvet Underground as a large influence on your music before– Can you tell me about The VU shows you did with PARKiNG and Good Flying Birds?
ES: Well, they were magic.
JR: They were mayhemic!
ES: But they were really indulgent…because there were 10 of us. There were two bassists, always about two drummers, sometimes three. How many guitars, four?
JR: At least! And for the last two shows, random people from the audience would just come up and grab a guitar or a drum and start wailing away. A lot of times I didn't know who they were, but you know, they're all part of the band. So it didn't matter.
ES: We'd play for like about an hour each time, mostly until everyone left. But In Chicago no one– people were really attentive and weren't leaving. But it was kind of a thing of like, let's see how far we could push this… and T [Moore] was really getting into it. He was really trying to go all out and get crazy. He put an amp into the ceiling at one of the shows. In the recording, you hear this guy, he's like, “You're breaking our fucking shit, man, you need to turn that shit down.” In Louisville, he built this giant ladder sculpture that was about to fall on me the whole time.
JR: I think he made an amp stack in Chicago that almost really did fall on Eli.
ES: Yeah, but I had to stop that because, you know, we can't be having all that with amps. No death and destruction.
JR: Only mayhem.
What was your favorite song to cover?
ES: Probably “Foggy Notion,” or “Venus in Furs.”
JR: Yeah, “What Goes On” or “White Light White Heat” was really fun for me.
At The Big Pop Show, Thee Maxwell Blast kind of had a similar energy, with the Sister Ray cover. Can you tell me about the recent Maxwell Blast release?
ES: Oh yeah. Well, just put out a record. I put out a record that was recorded in five different locations around Chicago on a four track. I've always felt like the Maxwell Blast should be about… it's music for fun. It's just about making music in a community together with people and not making it about one individual person's vision. It’s like, “How can we make a ton of music together and have it be different every time?” So this was just one moment of the band recording across Chicago. But the record is named after this guy, Pistol Love, who our friend Liam's dad went to summer camp with in Dallas. We just found him on Facebook and his name is Ross “Pistol” Love. Even in his dad's obituary, they refer to him as Pistol Love. He owns a life insurance firm called Pistol Love Insurance.
JR: And he has a brother named Boogie Love.
ES: Yeah and he has a cousin named Boogie Love who’s a dishwasher at Pizza Hut. I didn't even know you needed to wash dishes at Pizza Hut! So, you know, Pistol Love's really been getting around. He's in the new Lifeguard song. I'm still trying to figure out whether to send him a message or not. I think I should. I think I should tell him what's been going on and how much we love him.
I feel like he would really appreciate that. I know you've also done a typewriter orchestra with The Maxwell Blast, among other things. Do you have any ideas for what you want to do in the future with that?
ES: I wanted to do a set where it's like two guitars, but all the cords are a bit too small and you’re tied to the other guitarist by your back. So you're constantly almost about to unplug your guitar amp and you're trying to not unplug the other person’s and keep yours plugged in. It's a balancing act. That's my only idea right now.
[Eli] also just told me about a record you both made with Kai [Slater]...
JR: Yeah we’re in another band called Sex Gun. The three of us with Kai. It's just real down and dirty rock and roll… and it’s done! A couple of weeks ago, the three of us were in our living room and just wrote down like twenty-five song titles. We were just trying to make each other laugh, basically. Then a week later we went into the studio and wrote sixteen songs based on the song titles that we wrote down all in like four hours. Two room mics going into one track on a four track. Then a few days later Kai and I recorded the vocals, coming up with them on the spot. And that's the record! It's gonna come out soon, I guess.
ES: Yeah, we gotta just make the album art. But the song titles are really funny. It's like “I Was On the Plane the Day the Music Died.”
JR: “Bring me the head of Henry Owens.”
ES: “Shooting Speed with JB Pritzker.”
JR: “Shooting Smack with Elvis.” There's some other ones. The name of the album is called Night Wolfin.
ES: Oh yeah, and there's a song called “Night of the Wolf,” too.
JR: But it's definitely a way less serious outlet for the three of us. It’s just a way for us to make music as friends. But honestly I ended up being surprised by some of the songs being a lot better than I expected them to come out. So I'm honestly really excited for the record. I know I would love to play at least one show sometime. It'll be harder to relearn the songs than it was to write them. It's pretty lo-fi.
Why Sex Gun?
ES: I can't even tell you.
JR: It's self-explanatory. You don't need any explanation from us.
ES: Two words. Sex. Gun.
You both also do a lot of art outside of music, whether that be design or just regular writing. Could you talk to me about what you like to do to express yourself besides music?
JR: I guess my main outlet besides music is writing. Mostly in the form of poetry. I help run a small press that's currently based in Chicago but I started in Austin called Udumbara Press with my friend Tom Jennings. We're just focusing on trying to find and cultivate a scene of young poets in Chicago and beyond. We've been curating this monthly series of poetry readings at our apartment, where it's like four or five young poets reading. It's a space where draft works are encouraged for people to get feedback or just work through things on their own. That's been a great motivator as well for myself to consistently have these deadlines where it's like I have to continuously be working on new material because especially with TV Buddha being really active and working on our record, it's easy sometimes for that to kind of take over and for other art forms to fall behind. So it's great to have a mechanism that doesn't allow that to happen.We're working on like a newsletter right now. We're just like collecting samples from all the poets who have been reading at the different events as well as others like some friends here and in California and in Austin. And then besides that… this summer I wrote an epic poem based on our travels on the West Coast, which is still in edits, but hopefully it’ll come out as a chapbook soon. I recently started working on a short story too, because I would love to write more like fiction prose as well. So that's my main outlet outside of music.
Will you also tell the readers your different aliases?
JR: Well, you may know me as Johnson Rockstar when it comes to rock and roll. But if you read me, my Nume de Plume is Otis Johnson. If you catch me DJing, it's R.D. Johnson. And if you catch me on the street… don't worry about it.
ES: Don't catch him on the street…Mostly what's been interesting me a lot are visual mediums and printing. But I've also been working on this comp record that I'm doing with Gabe at Desert Island. It's going to be a compilation of Chicago bands from the last five years. But it's always proving to be way more work than I thought it's going to be because I keep adding things onto it. I’m making a full zine that's going to be a contextual history of the scene, which is hard because the scene is still active. It's unresolved… Wow. Sorry to drop that. [Unresolved is the name of Eli’s fanzine which should be considered essential reading to all of you!] But then I'm making a whole cassette that's a compendium of that, which is a ton of other stuff from people that I wanted to be a part of the project, but I couldn't fit on the record. So now it's a whole other game of cat and mouse with fifteen other bands about getting songs in. I didn't know about that. We're going to do an event here [NYC] at the end of March to put it out and then have one in Chicago the next weekend. So it's just a lot of work getting everything ready for it, but I think it'll be good.
Speaking of Chicago, obviously I feel like there's been a lot of attention on where you guys are from and that scene. Do you guys have any other places or other scenes that you really admire/think have a lot of really interesting work coming out right now?
ES: Austin is great.
JR: Yeah, there's a lot of good bands in Texas. Most that formed after I left, honestly, or were just beginning to form as I was leaving, like Guiding Light, Touch Girl Apple Blossom, Blank Hellscape, Paper Jam. Blue Ribbon, Heartknit.
ES: Paper Jam! They're really awesome. Cincinnati's super cool. Cincinnati's great. We have great friends in Indianapolis. It's a smaller scene, but I think there's people that make really awesome things there. There's great things in New York right now. It seems like everyone's got that “I want to be in a band” bug in New York right now.
JR: Yeah. And there's always great stuff around the Bay and San Francisco. We have some good friends there. One of the best parts about being in a band and having the privilege to tour across the country is just meeting people in all different cities, forming connections with those people, and being inspired by them. The best thing about the digital age is that you can stay connected with those people in a way that would have been hard otherwise. So you can continue to meet up with each other, whether they're touring in Chicago or we’re touring there, or we end up in some random city together at some point, we're really lucky to have that.
ES: It's a beautiful big family that just grows and grows. It's great to see my older friends, who are musicians too, where it's like they have these crazy extensive networks. There's not a city they don't know someone in. I can feel it building towards something where I'm like, yeah, I have all these friends in all these different places that I see every once in a while and have these bite sized friendships.
I have three questions left that are silly and I thought of them this morning on the toilet… If you could have the mind of any human and be in the body of any animal, who and what would you pick? My example was like “Ben Franklin inside a sheep,” you know, something like that.
JR: Frida Kahlo inside of a penguin.
ES: Maybe Mao Zedong in a bluebird.
JR: Yeah, we can organize all the other birds.
ES: I don't know. I mean, they're already really organized.
JR: You see them flying around in a flock. Yeah, they’re just some good flying birds.
Okay, if you were to be abducted by a UFO, what is the first thing you would say/do/show the aliens?
JR: What do I have? What kind of…? Describe the aliens. What do the aliens look like? Are they gray dudes with big heads? Are they tentacle monsters?
They're purple. And they... I would say they have big heads. They have big bodies too. They're pretty tall.
JR: Are they amorphous? Or are they very defined and chiseled?
They're defined and chiseled. And they're friendly. They're nice. They're abducting you because they just want to see what's going on.
ES: Mmm. Smash or pass.
JR: Yeah. Shit.
ES: Would you show all? That's the question.
JR: I think I would.
ES: I mean, maybe you don't have a choice. They’re aliens!
JR: I'd bear it all.
ES: They probably don't even know what that is. They've never seen someone before...
JR: You know, they deserve to know. It'll be an honor, honestly, to be their first.
ES: They probably have x-ray vision, so it's like, you know, clothes? What are clothes?
Nothing to them.
ES: You think they have clothes?
JR: It's just a social construct, obviously.
ES: Skin is clothes.
JR: Right, I would take off my skin, probably.
ES: They're wearing your clothes. What if they look like you? What if you got up there and they just…they were just you.
They're mod aliens.
ES: They’re all you.
JR: Shit. That'd be a great time.
Okay. And then the last question is, of this year so far, what was the best day you had and what happened on it?
JR: Oh, wow. That's a really hard question.
ES: I know the best day. The best day I had was doing the Maxwell Blast record. That was the most magical day and it was like going on tour but in one day and you had this whole arc where it's like, none of us had ever played altogether in one band before. And so the first show everyone was like, “I don't know about this.” Then over the course of seven hours, everyone got so close and we all felt like we knew each other so much just by playing together. Just driving around the city with your friends and making crazy music. There is just nothing better. When we ended it we had a campfire on the train tracks and then we played and then Amaya [Peña] played. Everyone was just jamming and like beep-booping around the fire. It was awesome.
JR: It's hard for me to say. I don't know if this is definitively the best day in the last year, but a really good one was one of the days we had in San Francisco. We spent a whole weekend there on tour and it was just incredibly fun. Some of our friends flew out to meet us there and hang out with our friends in Now [the band]. We played a beautiful show that ended in disarray above this art gallery.
ES: And we had spaghetti afterwards!
JR: Then the next day we went to the cliffs at Land's End. They're just astonishing in a way that had a really profound impact on me. It just felt like a really important time for me at least.
Do you have any parting words or messages for the future?
JR: If you have the privilege in your life to be able to swallow a pill, savor that. It ain't easy.
I wholeheartedly agree.
