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Quasi has been around a long time. They've been through (suffered?) many interviews. When it comes to reviews, every music critic above the moral tree line has taken their turn evaluating the band's efforts. Short of Spin covers, they've done it all. Perhaps a little insecure, I wanted to make this interview more fun than they would have expected. I made a little game out of the interview process where each of us picked a topic. To figure out who would go first, Sam and Janet, by Janet's suggestion, played paper rock scissors. "Oh, that's funny and cute," I thought, "We're off on the right foot." So it struck me as odd that as soon as the game was over (Sam declared winner, best of 5), the conversation quickly turned into a technical analysis of the contest. It became immediately apparent that these are two very serious people. Quasi is Janet Weiss, drummer and member of Sleater-Kinney, and Sam Coomes, songwriter/singer/keys/guitar/a bit of everything. In July of 2003, Sam released a solo blues-rock record under the moniker Blues Goblin. They both have longstanding Portland history. They've seen a lot of shit go down in this town, and it seems to have left them guarded and private. Janet, in particular, holds her cards very close, with a well-practiced poker face. Sam was less suspicious, but wasn't giving anything away for free. It was a little nerve-wracking, honestly, and the easiest part of the conversation was when we finished up by talking basketball…well, the politics surrounding basketball, rather. Still, it was easy in comparison to the rest of the interview. Judging by their pleasant conversation with the barista at Fresh Pot on Mississippi, I walked away thinking that if I actually knew and befriended these people, they would be fierce allies. To their credit, it is a small town, and we all have to draw a line somewhere. Their new and 6th album, Hot Shit, reflects the duo's passion. Arguably the best album from the band's library, it branches out with more instruments than the old set-up of Roxichord (a very unique sounding keyboard) and drums. It's Quasi, but in full color instead of the monochrome sound of their previous albums. I wondered if other music they've been listening to affected the shift. MLP: According to your interview with Alex Steininger you're both fans of Hella? Do you listen to other math rock bands or is that just one kind of a novelty for you? Sam: I haven't seen that many math rock bands but I know what the term applies to. I usually like one or two songs, it's really interesting but then I find myself not feeling it. I find myself counting. The thing I like about Hella is the spiritual energy. It is complex music but you don't listen to that, you just feel it. Any kind of music, eventually it becomes ridiculous to say I like this type of music or that type of music because good music transcends labels and music that doesn't have anything to offer beyond just a genre is not going to take you all the way there, you know? J: Isn't it just melody and rhythm and harmony anyway? Even the most complex thing is really just a complex combination of those things. So for me, usually if I can hear the melody, even if it's complex, I just think of it in those simple terms. You can hear melody in a lot of different things though. Like drums especially. A lot of people just listen for the vocals. But there's so much melody in all the layers. That's why a band like Hella is so rich, because there are many, many melodies playing off each other at the same time. It's so great. S: I've had a lot of conversations with my friend Stanley about this because he went to school and studied music with some advanced teachers and he has all these theories and he's very into a cerebral approach to music and I'm not at all. It can work both ways, but it affects the way you hear things and the way you feel things I think. In free and improvised music, a lot of times you're not supposed to groove. You're not supposed to play a regular rhythm. You're supposed to not do that and that's supposed to be freeing the drummer from the demands of just holding down the time and that's supposed to be a form of freedom. It is, but that doesn't free me because hearing a regular rhythm, a steady pulse, that's what frees me up. When I don't hear it, something else has to work to make me feel free. And it often doesn't happen in that kind of music. But just like "boom bop boom bop", immediately it syncs up with my pulse and my heart rate and my feet and my breathing and that's a form of freedom that if you look at it in a different way, it's a limitation on freedom; but to me it is freedom. It's the essence. So anyway, math rock is sort of the same thing. I understand how to count different meters and times and I appreciate when cycles sync up and diverge and all the things that you can do with music on a formal level, but that normally doesn't free me at all. I'd rather just listen to a really good straight up 4/4 beat played with a lot of feel. MLP: Are there any bands in town that you're a fan of? J: I really like The Decemberists' record and I like The Thermals record and The Minders are great We're trying to put together a local show, a bunch of local bands, like they used to have at La Luna when they first opened up. One dollar for shows. I miss that sense of community among local bands. It was a better time for our type of music. There's not enough people going to shows now that support that kind of a scene. There would be on any given night, Hazel, Spinanes, Crackerbash, Heatmiser, all those bands that could headline La Luna and everyone would play together. There'd be a thousand people easy that would come to the show. You couldn't generate that now. S: I remember the first one of those showcases we played, it was with Sprinkler and Hazel and I think Sprinkler had just put out their album. Hazel didn't have an album. We were totally unknown, had no records and the show was totally sold out. Lines around the block to see these local bands that didn't even have records out. That would not happen today, even if the ticket price was, "We'll GIVE you five dollars." It probably wouldn't work. (Laughter) J: It was a great time. It was so fun, people were SO enthusiastic and so supportive, whereas now everyone's just doing something else. They're on the computer. They're watching TV. People are just listening to different stuff. You can't be deluded and think it's just as good as it was and there's so much support because there's not and any touring band knows that a lot less people are coming. For some bands it's still really great, like The Shins are totally popular. S: I feel like audiences have changed, and not only just in attendance, because I think when we were just starting out we might play a show to one hundred or two hundred people, but there would be a pretty reasonable percentage of those people screaming and freaking out; even maybe heckling, totally involved in the show though. Now we'll play and there might be several hundred people, many more people than before, but almost everybody is standing there with their arms crossed and we're playing better than we ever have and we put ourselves into it just as much, but it's just that there's a different feel out there amongst the audiences. I don't know if it's just us, but from other bands I think that it's not just us. It's a change in the way people react to music in this era, a mere few years later from the times we were talking about earlier. J: I just rely less on the audience involvement which used to be, like, fifty percent of the show I played, depending on how involved the audience was, whereas now I rely ninety percent on my
S: Often you play a show and you get a few polite claps in between songs and you think, "Alright, well they don't really care but we're playing well so we're having fun. We'll just do our thing." And then after the show there's a long line of people who come up and they want to tell you how great the show was. They weren't giving it up during the show. I just think that people don't really do that anymore. People have forgotten how or something. They still seem to enjoy it. J: Maybe we should travel the country teaching people how to just let it all go. How to do hippie dancing and how to take drugs before the show. S: I don't understand why people go to shows if they don't want to just lose their minds and freak out like we used to. J: To me Hella was interesting because people would really freak out watching them play but it was still like a watching kind of freak out. I mean, you can't not freak out watching that band. People would literally lose their mind watching them. And a few people REALLY lost it. It's not just a normal band. You're not going to have a regular band experience, which is great. But it really takes something that extreme to get people to lose their minds a little bit. S: They remind me of shows that I had seen when I was younger where people would lose their minds because everything seems so crazy and new and it's been a long time since I've really seen that very often. Bands that don't sound anything like Hella but just kind of blew people's minds back in the day like Butthole Surfers or Husker Du or Black Flag or The Meat Puppets or somebody like that. Those shows had that same kind of thing. J: Even seeing Crackerbash here; it was such a sense of danger. You had no idea what was going to happen. MLP: What kind of danger? The crowd or the band? J: Kind of like Sean Krogen reeling his guitar around his head. S: With Crackerbash: physical danger. Like you could get hurt. J: I saw the drummer throw up and then keep playing. MLP: "Get me another beer!" J: Just crazy shit. MLP: On the album it sounds like you arranged things really differently. You've gotten a lot more inclusive with other instruments compared to the previous records, so as a listener it's a pretty dramatic change but I wonder if it seems that way to you guys. S: To me it doesn't really. People have said that but I don't think it's radically different. I think it's only slightly different. I didn't use the Rocksichord on it, and that was a conscious decision, so that's the main change I would say. The records that we've done that people are most familiar with were recorded during a period when we were touring a lot and the songs were all written and played while we were on tour. We'd just go into the studio and make a record and it was a bunch of songs that we already had. This time we didn't do that. We recorded a little bit here, a little bit there. We hadn't been on tour. Songs just kind of happened however they happened and there was no pressure on them to be a particular type of way. MLP: Did Blues Goblins influence the sound of this record? S: Working on that record helped me as a singer more than anything else. Playing those songs and listening to the way that that music, very simple music, just relies on feel and style and letting loose, as a singer I feel like I started out that way and eventually I started trying to be a singer like "Oh I need to sing better" and when I tried to sing better I got worse and now I'm sort of trying to go back to not being a good singer but just opening up and letting it flow. MLP: Pitchfork Media has been a reliable source of reviews for you guys for a while. Ever since Featuring Birds your reviews have basically read: "Quasi is great but this album isn't as good as Featuring Birds and Quasi should really stick to what they know but I have to give them credit for trying to branch out." What kind of effect does that sort of review have? J: I don't read the reviews, so they have no effect. S: Janet stopped reading them a couple of years ago and I stopped reading them about a year ago and now neither one of us read the reviews. J: I hear that sentiment. That's not just in reviews. A lot of fans say that too, but if you don't make music for yourself then why would you do it? And why would I want to make that record over and over and over again? They would just say, "Why aren't they trying something new? How boring." That's why I don't read reviews, because often if you stick around for more than three albums they're not going to be on your side until you maybe get to ten albums, then you're going to be back in. A lot of it is fashion and press, they don't really know that much and they have to write something. A lot of times they don't want to write what somebody else wrote so they try to take a different angle and if your band has gotten good press they want to be the writer that gives you the bad press. I don't know. People can write whatever they want. MLP: And it doesn't have an effect on you either way? J: No. I don't think about writers at all. S: Reviewers come and go. Newspapers come and go. We still continue on playing. Most of the stuff that has been written about us locally has been in papers
MLP: I think it matters a lot to people who don't get the press. To the newer bands it's pretty important. J: I don't know how much press sells records. Any of it is not proven. Really, touring is what sells your records. And that is proven. S: It's one of those things that when you don't have it you want it, then when you get it you realize it's no big deal. But you have to experience that. J: I'm appreciative for all the press we've gotten. It's not like I wish it weren't there. I just, as the person that makes the music, I don't want to be curved by something someone says about it. I'm not the toughest person in world. I can't read about it. I can't read a bad review and just shake it off. It really can bother me. I didn't want that inside of me anymore. I just wanted to have a better relationship with how I listened to my records that I play on. S: In general we've gotten quite good press overall, and are we rich and famous for it? No. MLP: You have achieved, or been given the liability of, some modicum of fame though, how has that affected each of you in your lives? S: I have no modicum. J: Someone's making a movie about you! Or was making a movie. I don't know what happened to it. S: No, he's still around. It's Christmas time. But I am not famous and I understand why. I don't have any particular charisma. I don't have any desire to be famous. So it's fine. J: No particular charisma. MLP: What about you Janet? J: I'm just a drummer. Drummers aren't famous. All I've ever wanted, I've said it a million times, is the respect of my peers and I really feel like I've gotten that and it's so rewarding. Everything else is just...maybe it will be there now or it will be gone. I like to be anonymous. I like to be able to walk around in my city. I never want to be famous because I don't like to feel like people are looking at me. I'm not into that kind of thing. And that's why I'm the drummer. You sit in the back...or on the side... S: I used to think it'd be great. Our society is all about being famous and so you think, "I'm supposed to be famous." Then you never get famous and then you think "Does that mean what I do is invalid?" and I've decided that for me it doesn't invalidate what I do and then you realize, "Well, why I am I supposed to be famous? Do I want it? Is it good? Do I care?" Eventually you just...either you don't care or you give up and you get a day job or something, because, most people don't get famous. J: To be respected for your music is an amazing thing. To influence peoples' lives with your music is moving. It's not a small thing. It's so much bigger than being famous. -mlp |
involvement with Sam; how we're playing together, how the set list moves, and having songs match together and not even really stopping to hear what the audience has to say about it. Now it's just more like, "This is what we are." More of a barrage.
that are no longer even in business. They're long gone. Totally forgotten. All of that stuff is so ephemeral it doesn't matter at all.