Interview: Wolf Eyes (2003)

This interview took place in early 2003 after one of Wolf Eyes’ rehearsals. It represents a rare attempt (at least on my part) at interviewing an entire band at once over the telephone—which, as it turns out, is not the brightest idea. On top of that, I somehow forgot to hit the “record” button on my tape recorder until about a half-hour’s worth of the conversation had passed. As a result, there are a few potentially confusing references below to things that had been mentioned earlier in the conversation.

 

I saw this incarnation of Wolf Eyes (Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway, and John Olson) a handful of times between 2001–2004, and they were often amazing—especially the two Bay Area shows I saw in late 2001, one at Kimo’s in San Francisco and one at the Stork Club in Oakland (with an enthusiastic Grux among the dozen or so people in attendance). I have not really kept up with them since then, but I know they’ve continued churning out multiple new releases per year and are probably still at it as we speak.

Is Violent Ramp going to be on the cover of Thrasher? [Note: Violent Ramp was a skate-punk side project Dilloway and Olson. They had a 7″ out on Freedom From around the time of this interview.]

AD: I doubt it. We broke up.
JO: Dilloway quit skatin’. He’s a snowboarder now.
AD: Naw dude, it’s like, mountain bikes. [Indecipherable mutterings in the background, something about hitchhiking.] Yeah, I gave it up for hitchhiking.
JO: Extreme hitchhiking, man.
AD: Violent Hitchhiker, that’s my new band.
JO: He just wears, like, cut off shorts and Manowar shirts. Instead of sticking out his thumb, he sticks up a huge joint.
AD: Try to get picked up! [Using overdramatic anguished voice:] “C’mon dude, pick me up! Pick me up! It’s freezing out here!”
JO: It’s totally extreme, man.

Are you guys still in a bunch of bands?

AD: Nah, not really.
JO: [Says something indecipherable, ending with “boys.”]

The what?

JO: The Damaged Dudes.
AD: That’s me and John’s new thing.
JO: Warpaint and air horns.
NY: What about Nostradamus?
AD: Oh, and Nostradamus.

Cause I know you used to be in a bunch of bands. Have you streamlined recently, or what?

AD: Well, we’ve just been so busy with Wolf Eyes shit, you know? Instead of having a bunch of different bands, tryin’ to do a bunch of different shit, we just do it all in Wolf Eyes now.

What about Nautical Almanac—how long has it been since Nate was in that? Or … since you were in that, Nate?

NY: It’s been a while, man. Shit, goin’ on seven years now.
AD: Nate’s only on their first album, when it was Nate, Twig, and Sol Meltzer.
NY: I started the band—I came up with the name and everything.
JO: Nate’s gonna kill it, too.
NY: [To John] Shut up, man! [To everyone] Yeah, those were the days, though. That was like my first band. No, I had one other band before that, Suckers for Lollipops, an improv guitar-bass-drums-harmonica band.

So what do you guys do in practice? I mean, besides practicing …

AD: We can play it for you. You wanna hear it?

Yeah.

NY: [To Aaron] It’s kinda taken apart right now. [To all] Practice is just, like, jammin’, man.
AD: We practice a lot.
JO: We probably have the easiest practice because we just, like, jam.
JO: And smoke weed and drink.
NY: We get pretty wasted.
JO: Yeah!

WY: You practice like three times a week?

AD: Yeah, three or four.
JO: Yeah, as much as we can.
NY: I’m always down here. We’re all doin’ our own thing, constantly.

Is it at your house?

AD: Yeah. Nate and I live together. We just kinda work on our own shit and then come together and put it all together.
JO: But we hang out all the time, like movie nights.
NY: We don’t have a lot of friends.

What are some of the other bands that are good there now?

AD: Cotton Museum.
JO: Repulsion.

Repulsion—they’re back together?

AD: No, John’s just excited ’cause the [Horrified] CD just came out.

With the bonus tracks?

AD: Yeah. But you know, there’s a lot of shit goin’ on here.

Is Pete [Larsen] in the same town as you guys?

AD: Pete? No …

All the “experimental” stuff I’ve heard that comes out of Michigan, like you guys and Mammal, is still, like, “sweaty” …

AD: … dirty …

Yeah. Is that true of all Michigan, or is that just what I’ve heard?

JO: No, there’s a lot of clean rockers.

What about garage rock stuff? Like standard garage rock?

Someone: It sucks. [Laughter all around.]

I mean, is that big around Ann Arbor?

AD: Nah, it’s more Detroit. But I mean, it’s kinda …
JO: The people behind it are really nice … but the music sucks fuckin’ Egyptian dog ass.
NY: Yeah.

What about the inflatable room again?

NY: Aw, yeah, the laser-tag deal. My sister goes out with this guy named fuckin’ Captain Nimoy—no, Captain Neutron—and he’s like this superhero. And this fuckin’ laser-tag troupe, that’s like this weird company that does these huge things for colleges, like college activities, you know? And uh, it’s this 5,000 square foot inflatable room—and it’s all black-light lit—and he’s like the main character, kind of like American Gladiators. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go in there in our black-light suits and fuckin’ play the jams behind the laser-tag game. It’s gonna be sweet.

Is this really gonna happen?

NY: Yeah, I mean, I’m trying to work it out. It’s a pretty big deal, too. The guys are, like, they’re real extreme, you know? They wanna have really extreme bands. And I was like, “You should totally check out my band, we’re totally extreme.” [John laughs.] He’s like, “We want some music that people will laser-tag to.” [Laughs.]
JO: Oh, that’s us!
NY: He’s gonna get back with me, but I kinda got the inside tip since it’s his deal, and he’s just got this entertainment company that backs him. It’s pretty sweet: 5,000 square feet, man.
JO: Hopefully Blind Date will go there.
NY: They have, like, casinos they do [shows at], too. What else do they have? Oh, they have the oxygen bars, which is pretty popular. Hopefully we’ll get in with that circuit and we’ll start makin’ some real money. I’m sick of getting’ fuckin’ beer thrown at me.
JO: Drinkin’ an oxygen 40 oz.

Do they have any oxygen bars there?

AD: Yeah. It’s really, really nice.
NY: Our merch lady and tour manager is gonna take us there this weekend for a little bit.
JO: She would do this interview because she’s our PR person, but she’s in France right now checking out the [indecipherable … “jeans,” maybe? “Scenes”?].

I thought this was the only place there could be an oxygen bar—this or Brooklyn, maybe.

AD: No, Ann Arbor.
JO: There’s like seven of them.

You’re kidding!

AD: No, there’s one. I don’t think it’s open yet, though. [Laughs all around.]
NY: You can totally sneak the shit out of there. You can get like the party pack to go …
JO: It’s really light.

Are you getting a lot of attention now that the thing [the Dead Hills CD/LP] came out on Troubleman?

AD: Yeah … I guess so.
NY: A lot of different attention.
AD: Yeah, definitely a different kind of attention. He just happened to ask us to do a record at a time when we wanted to do a record. And the thing I kinda like about his label is, none of the bands really have anything to do with each other. It’s not like, by putting out a record with him, we get lumped into in with any fuckin’ scene. ‘Cause we sure as hell don’t sound anything like the Rogers Sisters, you know? [Laughter in the background.]
JO: There’s nothing to say about it! He asked us to do a record, we gave it to him, he give us copies.
NY: We were comin’ that way anyways. He’s like, “Hey, aren’t you guys comin’ back here?”
JO: Yeah, “Do a record.” “OK.” And we sent it to him. And then next time we’re there, he’s like, “Here’s your record.”
NY: It was nice and easy.

So, you guys have a lot of cassette releases other than the stuff on CD?

NY: Mostly DVDs right now …
AD: I’m working on a DVD right now.
JO: Tell ’em about your DVD.
AD: There’s gonna be a DVD. [Long pause, followed by laughs all around.] It’s like a DVD-R. It’s put together really shitty. It’s not gonna be some pro, fuckin’ Lightning Bolt stuff. It’s gonna be super shitty—you’re not even gonna be able to go forward to any fuckin’… [indecipherable comment by someone in the background]. It’s gonna be like one of them $4 Sylvester Stallone DVDs, where it’s got, like, a picture of him now, but it’s a movie from ’78 …

People always list stuff like SPK, Throbbing Gristle, and all that when talking about your influences. Is that stuff you guys were really into? Your whole aesthetic isn’t like “industrial,” “society is eroding,” …

JO: [Sarcastically:] We’re pretty industrial, yeah.
AD: We’re totally into those bands, but we’re not …
NY: … we’re not into “sex and death to the utmost extreme.”
AD: I mean, there’s no reason to do the same shit they did.
JO: But a lot of people say that stuff just because of our instrumentation. But then if you say that, [then] if you say, “Oh, guitar, bass, and drums,” then I guess there Roger Sisters are the same as Fleetwood Mac or Eddie Money. That’s just stupid. Just because we don’t have a drummer and we have a bunch of knobs doesn’t mean that we sound like fuckin’ Guilty Connector or something. But I mean, fuck it, dude, we’re a noise band.
NY: Yeah, that’s pretty much what we’ve stripped our aesthetic down to now they. It’s not “industrial,” it’s just basically “noise band.” That’s pretty fuckin’ tough—we all agree with that. It’s pretty easy to convey to people, you know? Instead of being like, “Yeah, we’re kinda this industrial …
JO: … improvisational band.” No, we’re a noise band. WE ARE A NOISE BAND.

But you’re the noise band that people—I don’t wanna say “dance to,” but …

AD: Well, we’re kinda like a metal band, too.
NY: Yeah, I’d say metal too, but that’s kinda pushin’ it.

You don’t really see noise bands making the whole crowd move, like at that show at the Stork Club [in Oakland in late 2001].

AD: Yeah, that was fun. We want people to party and have fun, you know?
JO: We’re very much aware that the audience is there, and we need that connection. Our gigs that are not so hot are when we don’t have a direct arms-length connection to the crowd. It’s as much about what they’re gonna do as what we’re gonna do. ‘Cause we like to be right up in it.
NY: We like to have fun.
AD: If people wanna rock, we’re gonna rock. If people wanna sit down, we’re gonna play sittin’ down.
JO: We’re not gonna get up in your face and go, “C’mon, what the fuck are you doing sitting down? I’m gonna kick [kiss?] you.”
NY: Fuck that shit, dude. Luckily, we’ve been playing a lot of gigs lately where it’s just been totally psycho.
AD: Kids just going as crazy as they possibly can.

What happened at the high school show you just played that you mentioned earlier?

JO: It was fuckin’ insane.
AD: We played the basement in this super-fancy house in Birmingham, which is a real rich suburb of Detroit. It was this super-small basement packed with about 50 people …
NY: No, that was just all the people that could fit downstairs. There were another 80-90 people upstairs.
AD: But it was just kids goin’ totally insane. Some little 12-year-old girl got thrown out of the room and nailed her head against the stairway right outside. And she pops up and my friend’s like, “Dude, are you OK?” And she just looks at him and says, “Yeah, I’m chillin’.”
NY: We’re really into people freakin’ out, man.

You don’t play a lot of art gallery shows, I guess.

JO: Well, we just played the Detroit Institute of Art. And we’ve played restaurants and shit. We can go anywhere with our jams, man. We wanna play a Pizza Hut or something like that, like Taco Bell or somethin’. Or a basketball court.
AD: Set us up a gig in S.F. at a Taco bell. [Starts imagining scenario:] Everybody throwin’ cheese and beans …
JO: Totally. Some dude gettin’ his head dunked in the sour cream …
NY: We’re totally trying to play really small places, just so people have fun.
JO: It’s a celebration, man … with a bunch of middle fingers.
AD: Yeah! A celebration with a bunch of middle fingers. That’ll be the title of your article.