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Friday, March 21, 2003

By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic

The Mooney Suzuki -- Mike Miles, Graham Tyler, Sammy James Jr. and Augie Wilson -- write music for mods.

	Advance Warning Tour WITH: The Mooney Suzuki, The Raveonettes, Longwave, White Light Motorcade. WHERE: Club Laga, Oakland. WHEN: 7 tonight. $5. 412-323-1919. Additional coverage The Raveonettes 'whip it on' with fuzzed-out guitars

When Sammy James Jr. was putting the Mooney Suzuki together back in early '97, he had no way of knowing a new generation was about to learn that rock 'n' roll could rock with the abandon of his favorite band, The Who.

And had he known, he says, he never would have rocked the way he does.

"We started doing it," he says, "to differentiate ourselves from everything else that was going on. We didn't want to be an East Village band that, you know, was indie-rock but had a little bit of electronic hip and had a Built By Wendy guitar strap and just a little bit of everything. We thought it was this sloppy unfocused morass of mediocrity that was going on and our response to that was to do something to distinguish ourselves from everything else. So obviously, if we thought that within five years it would be what was the norm, we would have done something else."

So is he disappointed, then, to see his own "Electric Sweat" get picked by a major in the wake of all the hype surrounding the rock 'n' roll revival of the bands whose names begin with "The" and end in "s"?

We never said the dude was stupid.

"Not at all," he says. "Because the hype will go away and we'll still do what we like to do. I love making music. I love performing. We love having the band as a creative outlet for everything that we do, whether it's performance or visual arts or music. And whatever creative field you're in, if you're gonna endure a career over your lifetime, sometimes what you're doing is going to be in the mainstream, sometimes it isn't. If you love what you do, it shouldn't make a difference."

Carrying on a tradition you could trace back -- with the music on "Electric Sweat" -- to the British Invasion, the men of The Mooney Suzuki met at art-school.

Different art schools, but the point remains.

And that experience has shaped the band as much as "Live at Leeds" has shaped the huge guitar sound on "Electric Sweat."

"We've always looked at the band less as a band," he says, "and more as an art project of a band. Everything we do is very deliberate and thought-out and planned. I didn't start writing songs until I learned about composition visually at art school. I always played guitar and tried to learn songs that I liked and tried to come up with riffs and stuff, but actually putting a song together didn't come to me until I learned visual composition in art school and applied it. Then, I started thinking of ideas like motion and context in a musical sense. That's how we've always approached the band, like a performance-art re-creation of a rock band."

They even studied concert footage, both their own and all their favorite bands.

"We'd tape our shows and watch it and be like 'OK, that [isn't very good], you can't do that anymore. Oh, that's awesome, you have to do that some more.' And you know, we'd watch movies together -- 'The Kids Are Alright' or 'Let There Be Rock' or any of those Jimi Hendrix documentaries and just be like 'That's awesome, somebody's got to do that tonight!' I mean, we're fans and our band is a way for us to celebrate what we love about what we love."

And part of what they love is imperfection. James re-recorded a solo on "Electric Sweat," in fact, when he realized there were no wrong notes.

"Well," he says, "you'll have an L.A. session guitarist who'll record something and do punch-ins endlessly to get that sweet note, the sweet spot of that bend to that lick that they're trying to do ... and it's just your definition of what sweet is."

Imperfect though they were, at first, they had some trouble getting booked.

As James recalls, "We couldn't get a show at a regular rock venue, at the bars and clubs that indie-rock bands and everything else that was going on were getting shows at. But we started playing this mod night -- this '60s pop night in New York. And mostly, they'd play records and they'd have one or two bands play. And at the time, you could only get one or two bands doing that kind of music to play. We used to play it a couple times a month. We couldn't get a gig at the Black Cat in D.C. or the Middle East in Boston, but both of those cities, we learned, also had mod nights and because the mod community was in touch with each other, you would switch gigs with the other mod bands on the other mod nights and we'd go up and play some bar in Boston where the mod kids were having a fashion show and had a DJ and wanted to bring a mod band from New York and we'd do the same thing in New York, bring Boston bands down. And that's how we started touring up and down the East Coast."

How mod is it, though?

"This used to be a main topic for interviews when we first started off," he says. "And I mean, if you're talking about the mod movement of the '60s, certainly, we draw a lot on the same musical inspiration from both what the original mods were listening to, which was American R&B and soul, and the original mod bands -- The Who, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and what have you. So certainly, British Invasion guitar music and American rhythm and blues and soul is a huge influence on us, so in that instance, you could get away with saying there's a mod element to what we do. But on the other side of the coin, we wear leather jackets, and that's not very mod. That's more a rocker thing."

It's also more a "Live at Leeds" thing than an early Who-on-mod thing -- on "Electric Sweat" at least.

" 'Live at Leeds' was a definite reference point for a lot of the stuff we did on 'Electric Sweat' because I had gotten these Orange amplifiers and they had such a huge sound that we were thinking of an outdoor festival vibe for a lot of the album," he says. "But yeah, I love most eras of The Who. And we have a lot of material that was more that poppy jangly early Who stuff. That's more kind of where we were at in '98 when we were playing primarily those mod clubs. It's funny because I was writing music for the audience. I was thinking 'Well, alright, these kids dress like they walked out of 'Quadrophenia' and want to listen to a band that sounds like The Who,' which happens to be the band that was the reason I started playing guitar. But then, you read about The Who and that was exactly what they did, too. They deliberately created music for that audience. So it's kind of like a double way of emulating The Who."

Considering the bands they choose to emulate, it's more than just a little odd that The Mooney Suzuki is a reference to Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki of Can, a German electronic group.

But James is a fan. And the name is a joke. Or was a joke.

"It started as a joke," he says, "when the band wasn't really what it is and I was just kind of playing around with whoever would learn some of my songs and do a show. And we were coming up with various names and I'm a big Can fan so we named it that for a little while and before you knew it, clubs that didn't return my phone calls would call me up and say 'Hey, are you guys the Can band? Do you want to play?' And we were getting write-ups in Time Out New York. When you're struggling to get rolling in New York, you want to take whatever advantage you can and so if you're gonna get extra opportunities and extra acknowledgments just because of the name. ..."

Of course, they also got abuse.

With a laugh, he says, "People would come to the show just to tell us they thought our name [was really bad]. I was like, 'OK, you know ... you paid to get in.' "

For those who were thinking of paying to get in tonight, consider this advance warning from James. He recently told a reporter that fans "can expect to be buying a new wig chin strap because at the show their wig is going to launch off and rip the wig strap into shreds."

And that, my friend, is rock 'n' roll.