Something Old Something New

"To say something is traditional is almost like a putdown in today's culture," says The Mooney Suzuki's Sammy James Jr. He fronts a rock 'n' roll band that is steeped in the musical tradition of great rock bands of the past: the blues-based form.

But The Mooney Suzuki is not your run-of-the-mill blues-based rock 'n' roll outfit. Rarely do they tear into noodle-y 10-minute guitar solos or revisit clichéd ideas of rock ballads and world music-infused passages of rhythmic exploration. They're a rock band that, partly as a result of developing in the city they call home, go for it every second of every minute they're on the stage.

From his neglected apartment in New York City, Sammy James Jr. expounds on the influence of the city and the importance of remembering what's come before.

You guys are getting ready to go on tour?

We've basically been touring since last May. Since then, we haven't had more than a week or two at home at one time and the backlog of stuff to get done here keeps growing. Before this, it would take me a week to prepare for a tour and a week to recover from one, and now we're home for a week.

You guys make music that's been described as New York City roots rock. How much of an influence does the city have on the band?

That's a very good question because since we've been spending so much time out of the city on tour, it's given me a very interesting perspective on the city and on creating art in the city. New York City is probably the most difficult place to survive as an artist in any field, and I know that for any kind of youth-culture music, it's dead, and there're a lot of reasons why it's dead that I just discovered. Mostly it's 'cause no one can get out of the city, and no one can afford to get out on the road when they're not working at home and they're losing money out on the road. Bands are stuck here and they stagnate.

But the city itself definitely affected our band in this regard: before we were a band, we were music fans who went to every show we could. We know from being members of the New York City audience, that the New York City audience will give you approximately five seconds before deciding whether or not they're going to move on. So you have five seconds to make an impression. And that is who we are. We are making sure that every five seconds is so on fire that if anyone catches any five seconds of the set, it's going to make an impression, and that kind of approach to what we do live just kind of became who we are musically, as far as being high-energy and over the top and unapologetically showman-esque. So, that's how the city had an effect on us.

Are New York City audiences fickle because they've seen it all already?

No, I don't think it's fickle. I mean, why should you spend more than five seconds on any given thing? Because there is so much in New York and it all sucks, so five seconds is too much for most of the shit I have to bear. I worked the door at a club for a couple of years, a couple nights a week, and that's five horrible bands a night whose entire sets I had to endure. There is nothing going on here, it is rotting from the inside.

So getting out of the city, what do you find when you go to places like Ann Arbor, Michigan or Chico, California?

Well, there are good creative people in New York City who, unfortunately are going to go nowhere because of the structure. Yet in many other cities and smaller towns, you can work at the pizzeria a few days a month and pay the rent at your house and your rehearsal space, so it's very easy for artistic kids to get things going. In that environment, without the pressure, I think more can happen. But that's what's funny - in those towns you have these kids who live a less-pressured lifestyle and end up producing more but still live a low-key laid-back lifestyle. Whereas you have people in New York City who have four jobs, are in three bands, are running around 20 hours a day with their cell phones and their beepers and are the hardest working people you'll ever see, but will go nowhere because they've got their fists in so many pots. They work 10 times as hard as they would in a small town just to make the rent, but then they don't do anything because they're doing so much that it never gets focused enough to come together.

When you guys name names as far as influences, it's MC5, Music Machine and the Rolling Stones - very much the classics of rock 'n' roll and punk. What originally attracted you to that style?

Well, "originally" would be the word. I couldn't imagine falling in love with the guitar for some other style of music. You encounter either the electric guitar or that kind of music when you're a kid, and you decide that's what you want to do. Then you get a hold of that guitar and you learn the blues scale and bam - you're in. I know that's how it happened for me - blues-oriented rock, there it is here ya' go - and after a relatively short amount of time, I was just like , 'Fuck this. Fuck the blues scale, fuck guitar solos and fuck classic rock 'n' roll . I don't want anything to do with it, I want to make music that nobody's ever heard before.' I spent a lot of time trying to make music that nobody's ever heard before, only to, every couple of months, hear something already recorded of what we thought we were onto. I struggled with that for a while, and then when this band came together, we were trying to get shows in the city like any band, and we started getting asked to play these mod shows. I really wanted to sound like Velvet Underground at the time, but we thought that we could play these mod shows and play for all these kids who are going to go out to the mod night anyway because they want to hear the records and see how people are dressed, or we can play the open mic to nobody again. At that point I started to think, here's all these kids who want to listen to The Who, and the reason I started to play guitar in the first place was The Who and bands like them, so we started experimenting with that style. It reignited the love for the music that I originally got into, and that happened for all of us at the same time and the spark turned into a raging inferno. And then I came to the conclusion that, who the fuck was I at 15 years old to decide that I was done with the blues? Before I decided to throw it away, why didn't I try and actually figure out what it is that's being thrown away? I know now that I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of one of the most amazing results of geographical and sociological alchemy in the history of the human race.

So blues-based rock is not a dead form?

No. I mean, if you're dead, it's gonna sound dead. In 20 years whatever you're doing is going to be old anyway, so if you do it well, it's done well. Is English dead? We're still using the same vocabulary we've been using for a long time. You know, I could say something really fresh and meaningful if only I could add four or five letters to the alphabet. I need those extra letters and then I'll be able to say something profound…no. If you can't do it with what you have, you've got nothing to say in the first place, you know?

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