It’s about 11pm on a Thursday night and !!!’ Allan Wilson is in a bathroom in London. In one day, he and the band have been across three countries, waking in Paris, heading to Brussels and then ending up in London for a late dinner. After a long day of trains and seemingly continuous international media interviews, he’ on the phone to me to talk about their new album Myth Takes and their forthcoming Australian tour.
For the uninitiated, let’s back up and get a quick potted history on the story that’s brought Wilson to be standing late at night, jet-lagged, in a toilet chatting down an echo-y and faint phone-line to a girl in Australia about his band. !!! formed in 1996 in Sacramento California. They’d all been playing around in different bands in Sacramento in the early nineties which Wilson describes as being “an incredibly rich and vibrant scene at the time, we were very lucky to have all have been part of it. And we just wanted to play music which was little more in line with the parties we were going to. The dance parties. We were all listening to a lot of soul and disco, rediscovering a lot of the music we’d loved as kids, you know, Michael Jackson and Prince and wanted to do something a little more in line with that. We were all heavily influenced by James Brown and Prince and later a lot of other stuff, like krautrock and electronic music… and then we started touring, quite modestly and very punk style at first, playing peoples living rooms and basements. Our first tour, half the shows were cancelled during the tour. We’d end up at places, begging to play someone’ basement and stuff. It was really fun and I wouldn’ trade the experience for the world, but it was a little frustrating at the time! Ever since then it’s slowly, gradually been building momentum. People have been getting more and more excited about us and we’ve been gaining more and more respect. But we’ve continued to be excited about playing, that hasn’ changed. We’ve continued to get excited about music and finding new influences.â€
They’re heralded as poster kids of the New York scene, but they started on the other side of the country in Sacramento, California. Wilson explains the massive relocation. “About four years into being a band, five of us moved to Brooklyn, and two of us, myself and Mario, stayed behind. We both have kids, so it’s not as easy to up and move to a super expensive city like New York, you know, it’s very much a city and maybe not the best place for kids to grow up, so we stayed behind. And now I live in Portland, so we live in three different cities – basically spanning across the two sides of the country. Most of us live in Brooklyn, six of us are there, and two of us are not … yeah, it’s difficult and expensive, if any young aspiring musicians are reading this, we don’ recommend that everyone split up and move to different cities! It’s really expensive and you aren’ able to practice as much and have to get really creative about techniques about how to write even a song…â€
So then how does a band like !!! write songs when you’re spread across three different cities? “Well it’s nice, we can use the internet and someone will record something and email it to me saying, hey, can you put a horn part on this, or what do you think about this? We do some of that, but mostly the way we write songs is we record the jams. We set aside a chunk of time to just play, to just play together. We get in a room, set up some microphones and record us just playing whatever, maybe we’ll put a drum beat on the computer, the drum machine, and then we’ll just play. And then we’ll go back and pick out the parts that are really hot and we’ll write songs around those parts. There are moments on the record when we’re using actual jams, we haven’ even re-recorded them, we’re capturing the actual moments of us jamming and playing.
The live experience is integral to understanding !!! and you just have to listen the way the songs work together in recorded form to get a sense that this must come from the way they play together. I was lucky enough to see !!! play live in New York in 2005, it was a hot night, Coco Rosie, Supersystem and !!! were playing a late show as part of the CMJ Music Marathon, the doors opened at something around 11pm and !!! didn’ take the stage until 2am. Which, I don’ know about you fellas, but for this little black duck, that was certainly pushing the boundaries. I was just about ready to pack it in and head home, exhausted like, when !!! exploded onto the stage. Within 30 seconds they had the tired, hot, limp crowd bursting with energy, almost taking the roof off the joint. That energy comes from a natural love for playing live, and a small but seemingly healthy dose of performance anxiety. Wilson expands, “playing live for us is really exciting. Personally, I always get really nervous before the show, and I don’ know why. I think it’s just this instinctual reaction, I’ve always been very nervous, but over the years I think we’ve managed to turn the nervousness into excitement. I look around before a show when we’re about to go on stage, and everyone’ just stretching and jumping around, getting really excited to go out and just do it! We come out on stage and just attack the songs, yeah, on a good night I think we exude confidence. There’ a lot of sweat, a lot of movement, a lot of energy. There’ a lot of percussion, syncopated rhythms. We try to keep it interesting. We labour over the set order. We like the set to flow really well, we like it to ramp up and we like it to make sense from song to song, you know, if there’ two songs with similar energies, we try to put them at different points in the set, so that you don’ get into a hole with the songs. The live shows are very important to us in a practical sense too, in that it’s actually a tool for us to write the songs. We wouldn’ write the songs that we do if we didn’ test them out live. I mean, as soon as we write a song we start playing it. We’ll write it, practice it, and then we’re like, ok, we know it, it’s got a skeleton, we gotta play it out and see how it works, and from the first time we play something live, it starts to change. We’re like, “ok, this part has to change, this bit’s a bit too long, this part needs something else happening under it, or we need to take this part out it’s not working.’ But besides that, that’s how we started. We started playing before we started recording or even thinking about recording, we were playing our songs live. That’s always been the lifeblood. And since we started recording, we’ve always been “we need to record something that’s as good as us playing live’. And that’s really hard because we are good, we’re a good live band, but I feel like we get closer to it. And that was something we wanted to do with Myth Takes, we wanted to record something that captures the feeling of us playing live.â€
At around this point in the conversation I find the courage to ask for verification about one of the press-release tales about the making of Myth Takes. Apparently the band got a house in Nashville and had some crazy fitness regime going on? Is this just some record company spin, or what’s the deal? I suspect it’s so crazy that it might be true, and if so, I want details! So I get Wilson to set the scene. “We rented a house in Nashville, just to get away from Sacramento and New York, to get away from distractions and craziness, to be able to work together and live in a house communally, and at the time (Dan) Gorman was taking kung fu classes and their workout before they’d get into the Kung Fu exercises was incredibly rigorous. It was like quasi-military style workout, and he was like, “well why don’ we work out? I’ll dumb it down, do a simplified version of it, but it’ll be like really good to stay fit while we’re here…’ So we’d wake up and do kung fu workouts, and we had some humorous encounters, like the mailman would come and we’d all be out the front in our underwear, doing jumping jacks and stuff, and there’ like this super-gay house music playing and stuff. We were in this really depressed, predominantly black neighbourhood and stuff – it was really just a different thing that was happening in this house. We have no idea what the neighbours thought for those three weeks, like these fucking crazy faggy white kids come in and take over this house and then they’re suddenly gone. That must’ve been something for the neighbours to talk about.†One can only imagine a house full of pale white boys jumping around in their underwear in the front yard, then staying up all night and making a right racket practicing all night! Pure gold. Let’s hope that someone got that on video and that it’ll soon be floating around Youtube.
So if that’s what the fellas get up to when making a record, what do they do on tour? Instead of touring chefs, do they have kung fu lessons and a tight stretch workout regime? Are these boys in fact mad keen fitness fanatics? The live shows are pretty high energy – do they have a pre-show aerobic workout to keep the adrenalin pumping? Wilson laughs and refers to the track LCD Soundsystem did for Nike last year, 45:33 minutes of music made specifically to jog to. Are they into that kind of deal? “No no, but as we get older we probably should! We probably should, I mean none of us are twenty anymore. When I’m on tour I get a little tired, I get a little run-down. It’s hard to take care of yourself when you’re on tour, you get off stage and everyone is all psyched and wants to party, so you party, like every night. And you wake up and you’re like “ahh, I’ve gotta get some sleep tomorrow, this is like ridiculous’, but then you do it all again tomorrow and the next night. So we probably should take care of ourselves a little bit more. I think that’s in the cards, I think we will start doing something more like that in the future. I think Neil Young used to have this series of tour trucks, he had this series of 18 wheeler trucks that would follow him around and one was like a full gym. The trailer was a full gym. So like if we get uber rich, maybe we’ll buy like a full gym, a portable gym that we can take with us wherever we go or something.â€
Something to look forward to. Perhaps this is the dawning of a new age of celebrity workout videos, Jane Fonda for the next generation. Maybe your favourite party bands, !!! and LCD Soundsystem might be leading the pack, making the hipsters get into health hustles. Just please, no leg warmers and lycra bodysuits. I have a vision for a new direction, but before I get carried away I realize we should get back to focusing on the album. “Myth Takes’, the title track, has a certain country/western feel to it. What was going on there, while the band was in Nashville was everyone just checking out old films or heading out to soak up the atmosphere or something? Sounding genuinely intrigued, Wilson replies “someone else said that, and I can kinda see it. It’s funny that you say that, because that track was recorded in Nashville, that’s from a jam. That’s just basically me playing drums and Mario playing bass and then there’ some other stuff layered on later, like Tyler did some guitar stuff and Nic did the vocals afterwards. It’s weird, I guess it kinda does have that feel, it’s weird, we’ve never done a song that sounds like that at all. It was totally just we were starting a jam and I just started playing this stilted fast beat and I never play anything like that. Our jams never sound like that, but it stuck out so much when we listened back to it – it was something that didn’ sound so good at the time. We were like, “ok, let’s really start practice now,’ but then we listened back and we were like, “wait this is awesome, this sounds really cool.’ But yeah, I don’ know, country/western feel…I’ll have to talk to Mario about that. I don’ know, he came up with the bassline, but the track’ from Nashville. We weren’ really exposing ourselves to stuff like that though, we weren’ listening to country radio or going to honkeytonks or juke joints, or country bars or anything like that you know … maybe it’s just something in the air that makes that happen? Or in the water? You can’ escape it – you just go there and it bleeds out the walls, it’s in the sheet rock or something, I don’ know.â€
However this is not the feel present for all of the record. The lead single “Heart of hearts’ is perhaps a more accurate idea of the sound and direction of Myth Takes, and also the song that’s a band favourite. It’s the song that Wilson personally is most proud of “because it combines aspects and showcases the things that we’ve come to be good at – like using the live sounds and integrating them, making a building track where we’re laying things very deliberately on top of each other. The song starts out with us in the studio, just starting a jam for it and then it kicks into the actual track and we’re using parts of the jam in the song and then at the end there’ a little break. And then it just slams right back into the jam, like the studio jam, and it just gets really free and noisy and crazy and stuff. And it’s totally fucking fun to play live!†Which pretty much sums up !!! – free, noisy, crazy, fun and live!
Anna Burns
