John: Alrighty, so you guys made #31 on the Top 26 of 2006.
Eric: Really?
John: A little under the radar, but you did better than Mouth of the Architect. I did the math and you guys were a B+.
Eric: That`s all right.
John: How does it feel to be a B+ band?
Eric: Well, it`s far better than my actual grades were in any school I went to and dropped out of. So... so far so good. I guess.
John: How`s the tour been treating you?
Eric: It`s been amazing, dude. We`ve been playing in front of a full house of... some people know don`t who we are, some people do. The ones who don`t, they kinda know that JP played on the record but they don`t really know if they like us or not, and they make their decisions. The kids those that don`t give us an honest answer.
John: You guys did a European tour with Clutch, right?
Eric: That`s where we shared drummers. JP did double duty each night.
John: Wasn`t that supposed to be with Antler and Honky?
Eric: No, that tour was specifically set up for just the two of us. There was a tour afterwards that we were supposed to do with Antler and Honky, the booking agent was having a hard time with all the bands and the logistics – the bus, the money coming in. We went anyway, just took a van and punk rocked it.
John: Now “Red Hot Mama” (from Sucking the `70`s II) - whose idea was that?
Eric: It was JP and I. We were rehearsing, playing The Mystery Spot. I was taking him back to the airport in Detroit, and I was like, “Dude, we should do this song!” I put it in the CD player – you know, one of those wired out, drunk, the sun`s coming up, and you gotta get to the airport moments. And he said, “Yeah, let`s do this.” We rehearsed - I think it was three times - for the album. We recorded the track when we did The Mystery Spot. We took the tapes to Baltimore and finished it out. Neil and I did vocals and Tim did guitar.
John: Now how did you figure out who was going to do what?
Eric: Neil kinda had it figured out and I had it figured out. There are two separate vocals on that song. We just picked who wanted to lead and who wanted to follow and that was it.
John: Cool. How`d you get JP to do The Mystery Spot?
Eric: To be honest, we asked him. We said, “Would you be interested? We don`t have a drummer. We need to write a record.” And he said, “Yes. Let`s do this.”
John: Did he have a lot of influence with what you guys wrote?
Eric: It was cool, because we got to write with him, and we`re not used to drummers who are co-writers as well. He`s a great organizer of songs and music. When we sat there, Brad would be like, “Hey, I`ve got this idea.” And then JP would say, “Let`s try that one twice.” And we`d batter stuff around. The last album we did before that (The Last Men on Earth) took us about a year to write, and The Mystery Spot took about six days.
John: No shit, six days? How do you figure out what vocal lines you`re going to do?
Eric: Craig Riggs [producer, Mad Oak studios] helped me a lot with some of the stuff. Usually what it is, we write the album, and I`ll start working on vocals as we`re writing the songs. I had the chance to go to a smaller studio – my friend`s home studio – and lay down some vocals. See whether I liked them or not. Actually, I did harp there too, in a little closet in the dude`s house in Ann Arbor. Most of the harp stuff I actually kept, but the vocals I re-did with Craig, and he was really good at batting ideas at me.
John: And the singing with Brad?
Eric: This is our sixth album, and some songs scream Brad and some songs scream me. “I Can`t Shake It,” Brad`s not singing it. But a song like “Ten Cent Dynamite,” that whole part is Brad. The same thing all throughout our records. Especially since he writes his own own personal lyrics, I write my own personal lyrics. Occasionally we swap, but that`s pretty rare.
John: I wrote you a song for you to sing. It`s actually about me, and I`d like you to sing it to me.
Eric: Yeah, it gets too weird. Each of us has something to say. And if it doesn`t work, we`ll sit down and look at it and go, “Nope, let`s try again.”
John: I checked your website and you guys did your recording in three separate places.
Eric: We did.
John: How`d that work out for you?
Eric: Awesome. It could`ve been difficult, but it worked out great. We did the basic tracks in Detroit, and then a lot of the harp stuff in Ann Arbor, and the final shit in Boston. It was cool because everyone that helped us had really loving hands. It was like, “Now throw the ball to me and I`ll take care of it and make sure it sounds good.” By the time it got to the end, it was handled with such care, it was like a fucking Fabergé egg. People were really treating it well and they weren`t taking it for granted and telling us to fuck off. It was really nice. It was flattering. I`m sure JP`s involvement helped, but I think people were happy that we were making a good record. Each place we went, it was treated with kid gloves. It was great.
John: Al Sutton`s been involved with the past records, but you switched to Craig and Bill Kozy for this one. Why was that?
Eric: Al now works for Kid Rock all the time. His schedule is really full, and the timing was such that we couldn`t get Al to do it, because he was working with Kid Rock. Obviously, we weren`t able to pay him what Kid Rock was paying him, so we had to look to other sources.
John: Do you think you could rap like Kid Rock at least?
Eric: I can wear a beer in my hand like he does. I can rock the beer. I`ve never been much of a rapper. Although I`m a big fan of wrapping presents at Christmas, because I want people to be surprised. That`s my thing.
John: Okay, we gotta wrap this up because you gotta go sing.
Eric: “Wrap” - I see what you do there. That`s vaudeville. I throw you a joke and you run with it.
John: Any chance of doing a live album?
Eric: We`re actually thinking of doing a live thing in Spain. If we can make it work, it`ll be awesome.
John: Now what`s worse – reading reviews where they describe you guys as “whiskey soaked” or reading reviews that say “Not even a stroke can hold them back?”
Eric: Ah, yeah. That`s a tie for first place. “Whiskey soaked” is a big one. The answer is it`s a two-way tie. Any time Blues Travellers comes up also makes me want to cry.
John: What - “They`re like the Blues Travellers, but good?”
Eric: More like “Hey, there`s a fat guy playing harmonica! Look at that!” That`s about different as it can possibly get. There are guitars in Bob Marley records and Skrewdriver records too, and I don`t see anyone comparing those guys.
John: Yeah, but harmonica. And you`re not really fat. More like portly.
Eric: I`m more of a handsome individual.
John: I can`t argue with that. Pete Knipfing from Lamont asked me to ask you if it`s true that you`re not really on tour until you shit your pants.
Eric: That is an absolute, full blast truth. It could also be a close call, but it`s always you`re not on tour until you shit your pants. And that`s not taking this tour as a starting point, someone shits their pants. It means, as an individual touring, if you haven`t shit your pants sometime on tour somewhere, you`ve never been on tour.
John: You`ve been at this over ten years.
Eric: We just had our twelfth anniversary...
John:Factoring in all the times that you`ve shit your pants...
Eric: It`s only been once, but it was early on. I started to tour early on.
John: Is it all worth it?
Eric: Shitting the pants or touring?
John: Either or.
Eric: The shitting the pants is important because it makes everyone laugh in the van. Everyone`s happy. Everyone has that story that they don`t want to say that they did. And then Brad or me will come in and go, “Please be a fart! Please be a fart! I rolled the dice – ow, it came up craps! It came up craps!” And everyone laughs. You could be in a room with ten different bands, all at once. Laughs are falling down like rain. Maybe an hour later, someone will be like, “Dude, I gotta tell you a story.” Once you open up one crap tour story, every other crap tour story comes out.
John: We`ll end it with that. What was your crap tour story?
Eric: Mine is just a typical... There`s a hobo, there`s those things you wear when you`re doing plastering – stilts. And there was a midget. It was just a typical “I thought it was a sneeze – oh, great.” We were in a bar, and generally the bars we play, there`s no access to the toilet and that`s where all the trouble breaks loose. If they give you a club where there`s plenty of bathrooms to go to, no one`s gotta go. The minute we`re at a club where there`s one toilet and it`s four blocks away, everyone`s gotta go. I guess that`s kinda the nature of touring in general.
