| swearing at motorists |
BANDLIVESTUDIOWEBSTORE |
from copper press #11
After seven years of recording albums and touring the world several times over, Swearing at Motorists is an entity that is teetering on the edge. Or rather, as their torrid past weighs against their perspective future, the duo is a fulcrum upon which other forces are balanced. Coming from humble beginnings in Dayton, and having laid down some fairly minimalist, melodic rock and roll on four track machines, the band has run into the inevitable comparisons, which typically mention the fact tha the band's former drummer, Don Thrasher, played for awhile in Guided by Voices. Talk like this does get a band's releases some attention; it also immediately presents a barrier which must be hurdled. Being recognized for being part of a scene, or a town, or a genre is an arguable springboard of recognition, but in talking with Swearing at Motorists, it is not hard to pick up on an element within the group that persists without regard to its aesthetical value. After the departure of long time drummer Don Thrasher following the release of their third album, Number Seven Uptown, Swearing at Motorists is back with Joseph Siwinski aboard on drums. This new incarnation of Swearing at Motorists has just completed two upcoming new releases, and embarked on yet another tour. Speaking with the band, I look to see if their future is made of matter as dense as their past.
I was first introduced to Dave Doughman and Joseph Siwinski when the two were on tour supporting Number Seven Uptown, a notable album for Swearing at Motorists both for its content and the earplay it has brought the band. Speaking with Dave and Joseph about that album and the tour to promote it, I uncovered some tasty little pills; and like the songs they are sweet in the mouth and bitter in the stomach.
"It's kind of a, whatever, a soured-relationship, disillusionment-with-life record," said Doughman, the front man and mainstay of Swearing at Motorists. The stoned-cool haze of his words softens the intensity of the message they deliver, but, even as fragments of thought, they reveal his face to have been slapped cold by reality.
"My best descriptiong of Number Seven Uptown is that it's a record where the world is falling down around somebody and they can't really do anything but laugh at it. Rather than be extremely sad about it you just kind of look at the funny side of it. I just realized at a certain point, that nothing really mattered. Everything mattered and nothing really mattered at the same exact time. It didn't matter what I... what you do. The end result is going to be what the end result is."
The sense of disillusionment found in the thematic content of Number Seven Uptown is paralleled by enchantment of its actualization. Talking with Doughman reveals the spark underneath the indifferent exterior.
"I am the happiest guy. The records are bummers, but you're trying to capture a moment in time. At the shows I'm doing exactly what I like to do. Yeah, the subject matter of the music is kind of a bummer, but I'm happy to be in Bloomington, Indiana, New York City, or Ghent, Belgium. I'm just so glad to be there. I just think that mindset was a reaction to a mindset I'd been in for a long time, and a relationship that I'd been in for a while. You know, a relationship that ultimately reshaped the way I was being. I'm not gonna say that it changed me, but it changed how I was. I just think that there's a jadedness, an unfortunate jadedness to the Number Seven Uptown. I think that's where it's coming from. It's not as much that I don't care, it just like, huh, seen that, been there, done that. You know, it's like how many times can this happen?" The casual approach of Doughman's songs floats around reverence with which they are shaped. Doughman quickly admitted this to be true.
"But the other thing of the ambiguousness on Number Seven Uptown, I hope that I've achieved...that there's a sense of complacency, but at the same time there's an urgency. Right down to the picture on the cover there's no expression, and that's kind of the whole thing with that record is there's lot of expression but it's less raw emotional and it's more polished effort if you will."
Perhaps it is the polish itself that separates Swearing at Motorists from which they are, willingly or not, a part. As an ambiguousness toward life haunts the theme of the songs, urgency is found in the decisiveness with which they are created. The sounds themselves are not the typical experiments in room noise and distortion that have come to stereo-type the low-fi scene. Swearing at Motorists do have a casual feel to them, but it springs from subtlety and refinement. In truth, I find that Swearing at Motorists is more deliberate. There is a clarity and realism that distinguishes the band from their peers, particularly from Guided by Voices. Dave Doughman revealed this sound to be the result of careful calculation.
"In the beginning, I took great pain to make sure they didn't sound anything alike. I knew that I'm doing stuff on a four-track in Dayton, Ohio, and the fact that I worked with Guided by Voices at the time. I knew that there might be some comparisons. I thought people were going to say that I was ripping them off. So I made sure of things. I devised my tunings I use... the open tunings. Just made sure I recorded things in different ways. Sure I was using a four-track, but I tried to really make things sound cool in sounding real, rather than distorted, or weird."
The songs also offer a revitalizing realism in their lyrical content. Working in images of daily life, Doughman writes words that ground the listener, rather than leaving you feeling spacey and ethereal. Dave cited this trait as something else that differentiates Swearing at Motorists from GBV. "You know, like Bob's got all these fairies and dragons and robot boys and such, and I'm talking about things that really happen in my life or the lives around me."
Discrepancies like this got me wondering about how Swearing at Motorists felt about the media's tendency to associate them with Guided by Voices.
"It's a double-edged sword that you have to deal with," Dave surmised.
"I realize that this is all about marketing. I mean on one hand, it's natural. Yeah, we're from Dayton. Yeah, I worked with those guys. Yeah, Don was in the band. Yeah, we did our first records on four-track, too. But it's just a lame way out, because anyone with any intelligence and musical knowledge whatsoever could a/b our records. They don't sound anything alike. I took a totally different page from rock and roll history to rip off than Bob. So it's a real bummer to see it, too, because, it's like, you know we have nothing to do with that band, at all."
"Whether we're referred to as 'The Two-Man Who', 'this band from Dayton', or 'this band that has ex-Guided by Voices members in it.' No matter how it's described, whether it's for the people in it, or the place it came from, or the content of the music. It's the same stuff. It's just that different people will appeal to different things that they read, and I personally have to deal with that."
Yet it is as if Swearing at Motorists is awakening to a new day. Having performed just a few one-man shows after Don Thrasher left the band, Doughman it seems, was almost fated to meet Siwinski at one such occurrence in Philadelphia. Just hours after meeting, the two set forth to continue with the Swearing at Motorists endeavor. The replacement Don Thrasher has loosened the reigns a bit and allowed for a less restrained engine, and both members of the band are taking pleasure in their new form.
"As much as Don is one of my best friends, and I love playing music with him, in a sense you know he kind of did me a favor," commented Doughman on the loss of Thrasher, who had been balancing a family life with that of a touring rock musician.
"There's no way that we'd have played seventy shows by June, and have been to Europe again already. Not on his schedule and not in the economics that he can live with, you know? He's got a wife and kid. You know, it's a little bit different. We both... I mean neither one of us have any kids or wives, so we don't have any responsibilities other than our places, and I don't have a place. I just crash at his place, or my girlfriend's, or wherever. We've been on tour the whole time, really, so it hasn't really mattered," observed Doughman, who seems satisfied on the road in an Econoline van.
Similarly, in becoming part of the Swearing at Motorists line-up, Siwinski found the vehicle he was seeking. Siwinski met Doughman in 1991, when his then-roommates, Mike Hill and Neil Blender moved to Dayton from the California beach town in which they all lived in order to start Alien Workshopm a skateboard company. Ten years later, Siwinski was living in Philadelphia, the town in which he grew up, and playing in Thr Trouble with Sweeney.
Seemingly out of the blue he got a phone call from Doughman, who was playing in town that night with no drummer to back him. He invited Joseph to sit in for the evening's set, and by the next morning, Siwinski has joined the band.
Siwinski brought up the oddity of this rapid reformation, saying "It's weird how there are people you don't really think about for years... and they suddenly affect your whole life."
Doughman and Siwinski have since recorded their next two releases at MinorStreet/CycleSound in Philadelphia. An EP titled, Along The Inclined Plane, is due out April 2, and the next full-length album, This Flagnal Signals Goodbye, is scheduled for release on June 12. Both projects were engineered and co-produced by Brian McTear, a producer who Joseph had worked with before on The Trouble with Sweeney records.
Says Doughman of the new material, "The biggest difference between this record and the last is that I have been on the road either with Swearing at Motorists or working sound for Unwound, since September 2000, which has left me without a place of my own to create in. So all the songs were different locations around the world, rather than in or on the way to Dayton.
Siwinski's take on the contrasts between the Swearing at Motorists projects and those of The Trouble with Sweeney reflects the remarkable drve found in Swearing at Motorists. When asked to comment on the process of recording the new material, he responded quite simply, "It was a lot of work."
However, it is obvious that the work ethic displayed by Doughman and himself appeals to Siwinski. Compared with the chaos of recording sessions in which "no one knew what was going on, or what they were going to play," the drive of the new Swearing at Motorists seems to be just what his subconscious was looking for.
"I definitely suffered from motivational problems," remarked Siwinski of the stagnation that had become his past in Philadelphia.
At the same time, Joseph maintains an appreciation of his experience with The Trouble with Sweeney. Their albums are still part of his regular listening. While on tour with Swearing at Motorists, he was still brandishing The Trouble with Sweeney propaganda. On the day we met he was wearing a Trouble with Sweeney T-shirt he had fashioned himself with black felt tip marker.
In the thick black font of the T was the eerie clarity of the importance of the role Siwinski performed in The Trouble with Sweeney. Doughman pointed it out.
"Trouble with Sweeney was the reason you were at the Swearing at Motorists show in Philadelphia when I played solo, and then you joined the band the next morning. If it wasn't for Trouble with Sweeney, you wouldn't be sitting here right now."
With Doughman talking like this, I can't help but entertain the idea that destiny's fingers are dusty with Swearing at Motorists. In their efforts to create driven, sophisticated rock and roll, Doughman and Siwinski have each carried a persistence that has lead them to each other. Listening to the duo perform, I hear the reason that they have endured the trails of their past. What's more, I am glad for it, because what is produced wgeb Doughman and Siwinski take the stage together is compelling music that puts everything into place.
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