St. Louis Music Blog

(I neglected to post Part II last week; that can be found here.) However, without further ado, here is Long Winters front man John Roderick's musical history, part trois.

I’ve talked a little bit about rock and roll lifers, but there are many different types and I should probably define my terms. ... Another kind is the lucky lifer. They had bands in high school and college like a thousand other punters, but somewhere along the way they hit the numbers and became rock stars. The overwhelming majority of young bands imagine that this fate awaits them, a dream which in most cases will slowly shrivel and die covered in disappointment and agony. (But keep practicing, kids!) Brian May of Queen was working on his PhD in physics when his band took off, Tom Scholz of Boston has a masters degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, Dexter Holland of the Offspring has a masters in molecular biology, and so forth. These guys clearly didn’t intend to be rock stars, they were anticipating a lifetime of sodomizing bacteria before their rock dreams came true. Wankers.

John Roderick is now blogging on Mondays at the Seattle Weekly blog, which I just found out. So here's this week's installment, where he chats about how he got his start in music.

I arrived here in the fall of 1990 with no money and no prospects. Some kids I knew from Anchorage were renting a big house on the edge of the U District, with a half-dozen punkers squatting in their closets and kitchen cabinets, and I followed them home. They'd moved up from Olympia and their band, Motor Virus, practiced in the basement, along with the all-girl punk band Dickless and a newly arrived Tucson band called The Supersuckers. They had four Marshall stacks in a room just big enough for a washer and dryer. I shared a bedroom with a fellow Alaskan who made money by picking psychedelic mushrooms on the UW campus and selling them to frat boys. He slept on the single mattress and I slept on the floor with a rolled up sweater for a pillow. One afternoon I was loafing around the house when the phone rang. It was the promoter of the OK Hotel, looking for one of my housemates to work security at a DOA concert that night. I told him no one was home and he said, “What about you?” That was my first “music industry” job, crouching onstage at a DOA show with instructions to tackle stage-divers and throw them back into the crowd, where they were heading anyway. The singer, Joey Shithead, whipped out a chainsaw and started waving it around in full punk rock theatrical glory, before promptly cutting off the tip of his own finger. That show ended rather abruptly.

In this week's Roderick Residency, the Long Winters front man is faced with a psychological dilemma: Is he an introvert? Mind-blowing self-psychoanalysis follows here.

So imagine my surprise when, over a cup of herbal tea, a close friend confronted me and accused me of being an introvert. This was a new wrinkle that I had never considered. Didn’t introverts put tinfoil over their windows and talk to canned peas? Isn’t “I think you’re an introvert” a polite way of saying “you may have Asberger’s Syndrome”? There are plenty of reasons I could think of that would exempt me from being an introvert: I have friends, I like to get hugs, and I haven’t memorized any bus schedules. The many hours I spend organizing different sizes of rusty nails into peanutbutter jars is just innocent fun, surely not a symptom of introversion. What could this mean? It seemed that someone had found my Achilles’ heel.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I don’t like parties, or talking on the phone, or being around people for long, uninterrupted stretches, but I always took those as proof that I was sane and reasonable. I spend my free time silently asking and answering trivia questions about great moments in history, but again, that’s a perfectly benign amusement. I often catch my cat staring at me in a way that I find emotionally intrusive, but he’s a very nosy cat. I heard myself defensively rationalizing these activities. Perhaps they were expressions of an introverted personality.

The Long Winters, "Fire Island, AK":

In this week's installment of John Roderick's ramblings, we find out that the Long Winters frontman is going to be permanently blogging for the Seattle Weekly. Huzzah!

I was asked to undertake this column a month or so ago as a short-term "residency", which served the purpose of legitimizing my claim that I was a "journalist" and so therefore would be financially unable to make restitution to the plaintiffs in the unfortunate miscarriage of justice that was the judgment against me in Radcliffe v. Roderick's Miracle Enhancement Pants. That ruse accomplished I was prepared to draw the curtain on my writing career in order to concentrate exclusively on fleecing consumers by finding ways to get them to pay me to play guitar. But now the brain-trust in the executive office suites of the Seattle Weekly, who answer directly to the cabal that runs the Village Voice from a subterranean cavern a mile under the Zugspitze, who in turn must submit to weekly spankings by the undergraduate members of Skull and Bones, have proposed that I continue to columnize.

This puts me in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, the notoriety that accompanies being a columnist for a weekly newspaper is a bit overwhelming for someone as naturally shy and retiring as myself. The back-slapping and ballyhoo that accompany every publishing day threaten to knock the fedora with the "press" ticket right off my head. My brother Whitey, who plays the role of the Red Rasputin at the Showbox Theater, even complained that people are mistaking him for me, which has always irritated him since we were little kids back in the fjords of Norway. On the other hand the perquisites of mainstream journalism are astonishing. My Seattle Weekly press pass has already proved invaluable in twice excusing me from fifth period gym class.

In this week's edition of the John Roderick residency over at the Seattle Weekly Reverb blog, the Long Winters frontman details his peripatetic ways:

I've always enjoyed taking long walks around Seattle, especially late at night. Nosing around in secluded neighborhoods, sneaking up dark alleys, and peering over fences are not just the stuff of great blues lyrics, they're also the innocent pastime of a bored, curious and solitary type of person. Entertainment options are limited for those night owls who hate TV, and the local geography is completely fascinating at any hour. Over the years I've discovered most every shortcut, intruded upon every hidden houseboat harbor, and tiptoed around every overgrown shack with a yard full of washing machines and crab pots between Greenlake and West Seattle. In my early twenties I would pack two Grolsch beers, a pack of Old Golds, some weed, a journal and a flashlight in my trusty East German gas mask satchel and stay out all night dumpster diving and chasing cats. What a stupid hippy I sound like I must have been. These days I don't drink, smoke or chase cats, but I've kept on wandering the city like a tramp and keep discovering new things. Now that I'm living in the south end of town there's a whole new world to be explored!

Read the rest at the link above.

-- Annie Zaleski

Thanks to SXSW, we have two weeks of John Roderick's scribbling to catch up on.

First off: The Long Winters' leader goes to NYC.

I'm reporting to you now from the exotic and glamorous Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, (which is not, apparently, the namesake of Houston rapper Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys), but which IS the latest Brooklyn neighborhood to be infested with the plague of conformist Williamsburg hipsters seeking cheap rent who are incrementally destroying New York in every direction. (No offense to the conformist Williamsburg hipsters who let me crash at their place and use their computer).

Next, he lets a touring band crash at his place -- with disastrous results to his chili supply.

But as SOON as we walk in the door of my place, two and a half minutes later, the rabble starts: "Can we order a pizza?" "Is it OK if I open these chips?" "Can I make some pasta?" The enterprising band-leader, a well-known singer, opens my pantry, discovers my canned-chili depository, and says to the room, "Who wants chili?" Four hands shoot up. Back in Alaska where I grew up a man's stash of canned chili is somewhat akin to a normal American's savings account. I've known fellows who, when asked if they had given any thought to their retirement plans, pointed with confidence to a stockpile of canned chili. Even the most domesticated "foodie" bachelor who wears mohair sweaters and makes lamb with mustard/mint/tarragon sauce has, I bet you, some canned chili stashed for emergencies. And now this singer, this friend of mine, was prepared to dole out five cans of my chili to his band like a mother bird plopping worms in their mouths? I bet he was! Why not just start taking the pictures down off my walls?

-- Annie Zaleski

John Roderick of the Long Winters has dinner with Alan Parsons. An excerpt:

You see, I'm a member of the Recording Academy, which is the organization that puts on the Grammy Awards. Technically, I guess, I'm partly responsible for how terrible and irrelevant the Grammy Awards are, because although I'm supposed to vote on the winners I've never bothered to actually figure out the ballot and choose which excremental hip-hop video deserves to be video of the year, etc. My failure to vote means that winners are all chosen by ninety-year-old producers from Nashville who had one hit with Kenny Loggins back in '78. I look at the Academy mostly as a sort of fraternal organization, like the Benevolent Order of the Dwarf Oafs, where I gather with other old, ponytailed musicians unashamedly wearing black jeans and satin jackets. Then we take turns sitting in front of a giant Kenwood stereo and listening to Billy Squier on Memorex tape.

MP3: The Long Winters, "Fire Island, AK"

We're all big Long Winters fans here on A to Z -- as much for John Roderick's music as his writing style and sarcastic wit. Thankfully, our sister paper the Seattle Weekly has decided to make our weeks brighter, and has convinced Roderick to blog there every week. Bookmark this page and go to it every Wednesday.

Here's an excerpt of the first entry:

I was holed up in my little home studio last Thursday working on writing some songs for the next Long Winters record when I got a text message from a friend telling me to check out the lunar eclipse. There's a window over the desk where I work, so I parted the curtains and there was the eclipse right above me, the moon a burnt red. Fortunately, I had my dad's old Navy binoculars right to hand, so I spent several minutes inspecting the lunar surface.

I'd been laying down some mondo-distorto bass grooves over a grimy 808-inflected hard rock disco jam, as you will, and as I examined the moon the loop was still cranking out of the speakers two feet from my head. I gradually became aware that the music was still blaring and that I was sitting in my long johns with a bass feeding back in my lap while I studied an eclipse with binoculars, and I thought "I'm dangerously close to achieving a 'nerd singularity'". If I'd been talking on the phone about the Beatles, or playing World of Warcraft, it could have been a dangerous situation.

In any case, this next Long Winters album is going to have a lot of lunar-eclipse-influenced disco jams on it, and the Seattle Weekly asked me to blog about it because they are running out of ideas and hoping to squeeze some free content out of people. I, for one, don't mind because I'm mad about blogging! I was thinking the other day that, what with the incredible shortage of books and magazines in the world, I'd like to dedicate more of my precious reading hours to consuming the unedited journaling of as many amateur diarists as time permits! Hooray!

-- Annie Zaleski