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Paul: I have a long history that actually goes all the way back to the mid-70s. So yeah, I had one of the first punk bands in St. Louis, or pre-punk I guess because we started a few years before the '77 punk thing. We were doing Stooges and Velvet Underground songs and writing our own weird songs and doing folk psych type stuff too. Weird stuff with whips and saws, we actually tried to record sawing a piece of wood, which was really hard. I had a band, The Moldy Dogs, in St. Louis in the mid 70s. And then I came to New York and had a few bands with the same guy. But then after I got here I got more into hard rock, and sort of split off. Then I had a band called The Sorcerers, we used to do Motorhead and Hawkwind songs, and write stuff in that sort of bag: really long, pre-punk metal, long heavy jams. Then I stopped and was married in New Hampshire and lived in the country for awhile. I came back to New York and through my record collecting thing I hooked up with some friends of mine who moved here from Sweden and we just started jamming and that turned into Endless Boogie. Just getting together and jamming.
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I guess it's the only way it can work for us. We do have some more concise songs we toss out once in awhile. Over the years we'll grab onto a song we really like, sometimes from the 60s psych era, and sometimes from the late 70s punk rock era. But it's really the stretching out thing that we do, for us it's the only way we can really proceed. When we're playing on stage, we play pretty much the same way we play in our space, we just try to get to a place and try to cut it off if it starts meandering. If the show's really good it'll take us there, we just try to get right into the instant and just feel it and get off that way.Is that what you'll do when you open for Pavement next month?
We'll just do our usual thing. Everywhere we play we don't really adjust too much. We might feel it but we don't really plan on it. We never really plan until right before we play. Certain things will come along and we'll play them for awhile until something else is fresh to us and then we'll just go with that one. Sort of throw 'em out but we never think, "oh we'll do this one there because if we do it'll have impact."
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No, I think we just sort of do it. There's certainly some places we play and some people are just standing there cold. We've been in the situation where the whole vibe is not conducive to what we do, and we still try doing the same thing and if we get off and lock in it usually gets people going. We don't alter what we do so much, but we do try to get into it. No tactics!I heard that Full House Head only took you two years start to finish, the quickest you've ever made a record. Why so fast?
I think what happened faster is we actually went into a studio and recorded.Do you have rules about how you record? No pro tools or anything like that?
We're not too tech savvy in the group, we're more concerned with catching as much of the live feel as we can and being able to get that vibe going in that situation. Our approach was to record four or five hours of stuff including lots of improvised jams or riffs where we just go at them for the first time. Trying to catch the live thing. We're still not writing out this thing to perform, we just react to what weird turns it'll take, and maybe it'll take the right turn.That kind of sonic exploration and jam culture in general has a pretty tight relationship with drugs. Does that affect what you're doing, how you work or how you want the audience to take it?
I think there's an openness with the long thing, but definitely we're not going for the drugged out thing. That would feel self-conscious if we were thinking something like that instead of doing it straight up in the moment. A lot of those jam groups get much more into solos and musicianship, and getting jazzy and trying to incorporate all of these elements and craft it. I think our spirit is more like the Velvet Underground jams and all those great bootlegs. It really comes more from wanting to get a groove going, being a dance band, and throwing unhinged sounds that are still rock and roll on it. More for the feel and the groove of it rather than having notes that come together and are composed like a European classical music vibe. So I think when we jam it's really more like that, we're really grooving, thinking like, "I want to be a dance band in a ballroom, but not a druggy ballroom."ETHAN SWAN
