Pete Yorn

Pete Yorn: Let’s Get Lost

Indie rock’s golden child returns to the Heartland.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

It’s late in the day; the sun barely blinks over the horizon. The familiar bleached light bounces off the pavement and through the dirty windshied while white stripes flicker below like a busy signal on the highway. The man behind the wheel is lost.

That man is Pete Yorn, his trademark Prince Valiant mane tossing in the wind blowing through an open window. He wears the same T-shirt and jeans he wore earlier that day in ARC Studios, where he stood behind a microphone, “cans” on head, singing, while producer Mike Mogis listened and twisted the dials atop the massive control board, glancing up occasionally to watch Yorn through the window.

It was 2008 when Yorn found himself in Nebraska only a few weeks after finishing recording sessions with producer and living legend Frank Black of Pixies fame for Yorn’s self-titled rock record, which has become known by some as “the Black album.” Between those Frank Black sessions and the release of the “Black album” in September 2010, Yorn released the Mogis-produced Back and Fourth (in June 2009), along with a collection of duets with Scarlett Johansson called Break Up, recorded two years earlier but released in September 2009.

It is only now that Yorn has had a chance to really perform the songs on the “Black album.”

“Ever since I recorded those songs I’ve been excited about the opportunity to play them live,” he said from his home in Santa Monica, California. “I haven’t been out touring in a bus in a year. I’m ready to play some good rock shows again.”

Pete Yorn, self titled (Vagrant 2010)

Yorn recalled the contrast between Frank Black’s recording style and working with Mike Mogis. “They’re both guys who I really respect a lot and enjoy working with,” he said. “Mike is more detailed, more layering and I knew that going in. I also knew with Frank that I’d only have five days (in the studio) to capture something fast and not be too fussy about it. It was the antithesis of what we did in Omaha. That said, it’s all rock and roll, and both have different energies.”

The final products also couldn’t be more different. Yorn’s eponymous album, which will be the center point of Saturday night’s concert at the Whiskey Roadhouse, is barebones and abrasive, a rough ride that, on songs like “Velcro Shoes” and “Badman,” sideswipes garage rock without losing any of Yorn’s songwriting depth. Black’s influence saturates every track, from the chugging guitars to Yorn’s gravelly vocals.

In comparison, Back and Fourth is downright ornate; a soulful, personal album with the subtle touches that Yorn — and Mogis — are known for. Instead of five days, Yorn spent two and a half months in Omaha working on Back and Fourth. Over that time, he became immersed in the Omaha scene, hanging out at a wine bar in Dundee, eating at a Middle Eastern restaurant downtown, becoming involved in the spiritual center of Omaha, and going to rock shows. Maybe you were at one of the clubs on a night when someone leaned over, pointed and whispered: “Pssst… Look. Pete Yorn’s here tonight.”

“I never go out when I’m home; it’s very rare that I go to bars,” Yorn said. “But when I was there, I wanted to take it all in. I went to a number of shows at Slowdown. I remember going to see The Notwist after a group of kids told me about the show. I’d never even heard of them. That night I ran into the guys in Cursive and a bunch of other people I’d met. I started to realize that there was a cool group of really creative people that made up the scene, a tightly knit scene, and from an outsider’s perspective, it was refreshing to see.”

But just as memorable about his months in Nebraska were the times Yorn spent exploring the highways alone. “After we laid down tracks, there was a lot of down time,” Yorn said. “I like to go on drives. I had a car and drove around for hours, exploring the area.

“One time I was driving in the middle of the day and heading south. I was on my cell phone talking to someone in New York and became distracted. I looked around and thought ‘Where the hell am I?’ I was surrounded by cornfields. I love getting lost in cornfields.”

Yorn said for Saturday night’s show, expect to hear not only songs off the “Black album,” but from his full catalogue, including his landmark first album, musicforthemorning after. “When I go see a band and they play 20 songs I’ve never heard before, I think, ‘What the fuck is this?’ I’m not interested in doing that. It’ll be a balanced show. I’m excited to see what the catalyst in every room will be. There are always different people yelling different shit. I love it when people yell at me.”

Pete Yorn plays with Ben Kweller & The Wellspring, Saturday, Feb. 19, at Whiskey Roadhouse at The Horseshoe Casino, 2701 23rd Avenue, Council Bluffs. Showtime is 8 p.m. Tickets are $25. For more information, visit horseshoecouncilbluffs.com.

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Some extra copy that didn’t make it into the Pete Yorn feature:

Just the night before our interview, Yorn stood alone on stage at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan playing a solo acoustic version of “Rockin’ in the Free World” at a Neil Young tribute concert that also featured, among others, J Mascis, Glen Hansard, Jakob Dylan, Shawn Colvin and Patti Smith.

“Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield did ‘Cinnamon Girl,'” Yorn said. “Both played Gibson SG electric guitars, it was really cool.”

What made Yorn’s performance particularly special was the song choice. “(Rockin’ in the Free World) was the first song I ever really sang in front of a band,” he said, adding that prior to that he sat behind a drum kit. “They coaxed me out front to sing. I was 15 years old in a talent show in New Jersey where I grew up. So it was coming full circle.”

Yorn also talked about what he’s been doing since finishing his last record: “I’ve been working on something loose over at a buddy’s house, a covers record,” he said. “It’s a palette cleanser for me to explore other songs and reinterpret them. We got 10 songs worked out. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but it’s fun.”

And he talked about his flight from Omaha after the Mogis sessions ended. “I drove cross country back home on  Halloween,” Yorn said. “I listened to The Shining book all the way through Colorado. I was driving through the mountains listening to The Shining.” It doesn’t get much spookier than that.

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Everything points to strong opening-week numbers for Bright Eyes’ The People’s Key. Mike Fratt, who runs Homer’s Music, said his stores sold a total of 76 copies of the recording yesterday — 45 CDs and 31 LPs. Fratt also said the The People’s Key was the No. 1 seller at indie retailers yesterday. A glance at the iTunes Store shows The People’s Key charting at No. 7 on its albums list. And yesterday Amazon began offering an mp3 download of the album for just $3.99 — a price point that helped catapult Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts for its first week of sales.

Hurting Bright Eyes’ quest for the top Billboard spot, however, are strong sales by artists who performed on Sunday night’s Grammy broadcast. “The grammy spike is REAL big this year,” Fratt said. In fact five of the six spots above The People’s Key on the iTunes top-sellers list are all Grammy performers (Mumford and Sons currently sits at the top).

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Tomorrow: Tennis

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Interpol's Sam Fogarino

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Here’s some extra credit that didn’t make it into last week’s Interpol feature.

So where exactly was Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino when I spoke to him a few weeks ago over the phone?

“I’m in my studio in Athens, Georgia. I’ve been working with a band called Twin Tigers that hails from Athens as well. We took them on tour with us this past summer, and I’ve been helping them track and mix their new EP.”

Twin Tigers started in 2007 when Matthew Rain and Aimee Morris were working at Grit, Michael Stipe’s restaurant in Athens. Athens must be a small, small town because everyone there seems to have run into Stipe at some point in their lives (Six Degrees of Michael Stipe?). Anyway, the band has released its previous material on Old Flame Records; and I remember seeing them at SXSW last year at the temporary tent club known as Emo’s Annex (across from Emo’s, of course). The four-piece all wore white T shirts and sounded like soaring indie rock, with an undercurrent of shoegaze and an extra helping of Jesus and Mary Chain.

“Twin Tigers were friends first,” Fogarino said of their relationship. “My wife discovered them on Myspace and turned me onto them.” It was only a matter of time before Fogarino ran into the band. “Athens is the size of a dime. I met them just before we decided to take them on the road (with Interpol). Matthew (Rain) approached me outside of a record store. He had a copy of The Cars’ Candy-O under his arm that he was buying for a friend.”

After the tour, Twin Tigers were invited into Fogarino’s private studio that he shares with a business partner. “The challenge is to capture their live essence on recording when there’s really nothing live about about the recording process,” Fogarino said. “I thought I could tap into that energy and abandon, and bring a sense of empathy to the process.”

Plus he wanted to help out the starving artists. “They’re a young band and they don’t have a budget to record,” Fogarino said. “They’re friends and we have respect on a musical level. So the proverbial clock isn’t ticking during these sessions; they don’t have to worry because they only have an hour left.”

But that said, Fogarino doesn’t want to turn the sessions into a “My Bloody Valentine-type thing. It’s a four-song EP. We’ll get back from touring at the same time and spend a week together and get it done.”

So how does working on a project like Twin Tigers translate to Interpol? Fogarino, who has also played with Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin in the band Magnetic Morning, said it’s impossible to not bring something back to the table. “There’s always a new recording technique or just an observation on how something is done,” he said. “It kind of makes going back home, let’s say, a lot more refreshing. You got a chance to stray for a little while and then return when you’re comfortable.”

With Twin Tigers “they don’t feel that I’m being this bigshot that’s telling them how it is,” Fogarino said, adding that his role as a sort of mentor involves passing along anecdotes about his early days with Interpol. “Interpol has a great sense of integrity in terms of how we handled our success, so to speak” he said. “But every now and again you find yourself bitching about superficial shit and I think back to Twin Tigers, working in a vegetarian restaurant and having to find someone to cover their shift. It provides an interesting sense of reality.”

I don’t need to tell you that Interpol’s show tomorrow night at The Slowdown has been sold out for weeks. It’s worth it to try to scrounge up some tickets if you have a chance. They’ll be bringing their arena show to one of the smallest venues they’ll be playing on this tour, and it’s bound to be spectacular.

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Bright Eyes announced that it’s playing at WestFair Amphitheater in Council Bluffs June 4 with Jenny and Johnny. The $25 tickets go on sale this Saturday. I thought for sure Bright Eyes was going to be the MAHA Music Festival headliner, but not anymore… Now what, MAHA?

Speaking of Bright Eyes, the new issue of Rolling Stone arrived at my doorstep today, and The People’s Key is the featured CD review. The 3-1/2 star review by Jon Dolan concludes with: “He manages to be everything at once: folkie and punk, old soul and eternal boy, high-plains drifter and hipster heartthrob. He’s busy being born again every time he strums a chord.” Read the whole thing online here.

So far the album has received a rating of “90” from review-site aggregator Album of the Year (here).

My review of The People’s Key goes online tomorrow.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Column 308: River Rising

Omaha’s indie radio show moves to Sunday afternoons.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Is having one good radio station in a city the size of Omaha — a city purported to be one of the “best places to live in America” — too much to ask?

Apparently it is. But at least for 2-1/2 hours a week, we have New Day Rising on FM radio station KIWR, 89.7 The River. No, NDR is not a new program. It’s been around since December 2004. But if you’re like me, the last thing you’re doing Sunday nights at 9 p.m. is listening to the radio. Thankfully, the people who run The River decided to move NDR to the new time slot of 2:30 Sunday afternoons where it’s now being discovered by people who live “normal lives.”

The show’s promo calls it “The future of music. The best deep cuts and the best new tracks.” But it’s more than that. NDR is the only locally produced broadcast radio show whose purpose is to play, promote and talk about indie rock — or at least the style of indie rock preferred by the show’s producer, engineer and host, David Leibowitz.

“I’m not trying to out-indie indie music fans,” Leibowitz said between songs during last week’s show, broadcast from The River’s Council Bluffs studios on the campus of Iowa Western Community College. “People who are serious music fans and read all the blogs and Brooklyn Vegan and Pitchfork aren’t going to have never heard these songs before. This is for moderate, traditional music fans, some of the regular River listeners or someone who’s just casually tuning in.”

For the same reason I began writing about bands 20-odd years ago, Leibowitz began doing his radio show six years ago: To get free music. “I get too much of it, actually,” he said. “Parts of my house look like I’m a hoarder because of the piles of CDs.” But he added, “The show is my only connection to the local music community. I’m playing my role.”

That role involves proudly carrying the banner for College Music Journal

-style rock. His playlist for last Sunday afternoon’s show included tracks by Middle Brother, Ponderosa, The New Pornographers, Say HI, Tapes ‘n’ Tapes, The Dears, Men Without Pants, Cold War Kids, P.J. Harvey, King Kahn and the Shrines, Sleigh Bells and Starry Saints. NDR is the first radio show in Omaha to air a track from the upcoming Mogwai album Hardcore Will Never Die. That alone makes it relevant.

But in addition to new music, Leibowitz sprinkles in classic tracks by the likes of Hüsker Dü, Grant Hart, Gang of Four, Radiohead, Buffalo Tom, Wilco and perennial sign-off band Sonic Youth. Like the old-time radio DJs who have long since left this earth, Leibowitz’s playlist reflects his personal taste. “I would say (the show) is in the traditional indie rock vein,” he said. “There’s a resemblance to ’80s college rock. I don’t want to play stuff that I absolutely don’t like. That’s just a fact. My taste doesn’t match up with Pitchfork, but I’m not concerned about it.”

You’re not likely to hear a Pet Shop Boys or New Order track on NDR. “I’m less inclined to play synthier music,” Leibowitz said. “My past is with Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, but I didn’t like The Cure in the ’80s and I do now. If New Order has a new record out, I would give it a spin, even though New Order doesn’t really fit into the format.”

Another “artificial constraint” is not playing songs you could hear on another radio station. “T. Rex would fit in, but you can hear it on Z-92,” he said.

Leibowitz freely admits that there’s a variety of indie-flavored Internet radio shows that are just a click away for most fans. What makes NDR unique is its local angle. Leibowitz plays songs by bands that are headed to Omaha to perform in the coming weeks or months, such as Best Coast, Now, Now and Mogwai, along with a handful of local indie bands that are ignored by The River’s local-only radio show, Planet O.

In addition to the all-stars on the Saddle Creek Records label, Leibowitz has played tracks by Little Brazil, Honey & Darling, It’s True and Thunder Power, among others. “I don’t play those bands just because they’re local, but because their music is of the same quality as the other music on the show,” Leibowitz said.

Sometimes those tracks even catch the attention of The River’s program director, Sophia John. “She acknowledges that there have been records that premiered on New Day Rising that have made it into regular rotation,” Liebowitz said. “It’s great to see these bands get heard by a wider audience.”

So how well is NDR doing in the all-important Arbitron ratings? Leibowitz said he’s “blissfully unaware, for the most part. We must be doing well since they keep moving us up to better time slots.”

Could NDR ever find a regular, daily slot on The River’s schedule? Unlikely. Indie music always has been a niche genre that’s lived in the cracks between commercial rock and the style of “alternative” screamo goon rock that makes up The River’s usual programming.

and that’s the way it’s always been, Leibowitz said. “There’s just more of them than us,” he said. “It’s the nature of being an indie music fan. It’s part of the psyche.”

* * *

Polar Control Cent… Whoops! I mean POISON Control Center returns tonight to Slowdown Jr. with Bradley Unit (who, according to his Myspace page, is now a member of Talking Mountain). $7, 9 p.m.

Meanwhile, over at The Waiting Room, Blue Bird headlines a show. The 7-piece ensemble is led by Marta Fiedler and includes Carrie Butler (ex-Eagle Seagull) and Megan Morgan (Landing on the Moon) on backup vocals. Here’s a review of their debut performance last November. Also on the bill are The Boring Daylights (Sarah Benck’s new joint) and The Big Deep. $7, 9 p.m.

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Tomorrow: Omaha Website Deathmatch.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Interpol circa 2010. Photo by Jelle Wagenaar.

Fashionably Gone

Interpol returns with a new face on bass.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

When Interpol makes its triumphant return to Omaha after an eight-year absence, they’ll be one man down and two men up.

Iconic bass player and fashion plate Carlos Dengler, a.k.a. Carlos D, no longer is a member of Interpol, having left just after the recording sessions wrapped up for the band’s new, self-titled album. The announcement came as a surprise to long-time Interpol fans who credit Carlos D for, among other things, the band’s impeccable sense of style. But the fans weren’t the only ones surprised by Dengler’s defection.

“It’s kind of weird,” said Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino from his home in Athens, Georgia, just prior to leaving on the tour that brings Interpol to Omaha Feb. 9. “It’s a weird sensation when you realize you’re in a band with such a whimsical person who you’d never thought would pull a 180.”

Fogarino said Carlos D’s announcement came out of the blue. “He decided essentially that he’s done with making music in a rock band,” Fogarino said. “He got tired of the paradigm and lost his affinity for playing four strings and wanted to concentrate on classical composition and/or scoring for motion pictures. We all really wish him well.”

But as the interview went on, it was obvious that the loss of Carlos still stings like a betrayal. “We all have outside interests with music or art forms,” Fogarino said. “We’re in this for life. It’s something we all wanted to do since childhood. How many bands are out there whose body of work will never see the light of day? Talent has nothing to do with it. This person was in a great band and had creative freedom, and he up and walked away. It’s truly bizarre to me. After the confusion and anger of the whole situation, you say ‘I hope you don’t keep doing that in life, because life doesn’t tolerate it.’ I would love to be many different things, and if I answered to those whims it would be ridiculous, I wouldn’t get anywhere.”

Interpol, self-titled (Matador, 2011)

But Fogarino quickly added, “That’s not to say (Dengler) hasn’t found his true calling. This could be his stepping-stone, whereas this band is my end point.

“It’s one thing to be the flavor-of-the-minute, the whole Andy Warhol thing,” Fogarino continued, “it’s another thing to be accepted and to hit a level of establishment and not be taken lightly, and to be able to tour every record and have your fan base keep growing and returning. For someone like me, (guitarist vocalist) Daniel (Kessler) and (guitarist vocalist) Paul (Banks), it’s the be all and end all. You work toward it and keep a close eye on the integrity of the band and try to expand without making a fool of yourself and watering down what got you to this position to begin with.”

That’s exactly what Interpol has managed to do throughout its 13-year career. After recording several EPs, Interpol released its debut full-length, 2002’s Turn on the Bright Lights, on Matador Records — an album that immedately established them on a national level as the arbiters of a stylish, distinctive post-punk sound that paid homage to predecessors like Joy Division and Gang of Four. Those early comparisons slowly faded into the background as 2004’s Antics and 2007’s Our Love to Admire galvanized their intense, foreboding style in the minds of their ever-growing fan base.

The band’s recently released self-titled album carries on the tradition — it sounds like an Interpol album, but with a nod toward its early days, thanks to producer Alan Moulder, whose body of work includes albums with My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Swervedriver, Jesus and Mary Chain and Nine Inch Nails.

“Alan signed on and for the first time, there was a great level of comfort to let the mixer mix the record,” Fogarino said.  “We had nothing to fret over.”

But they still had to worry about who would handle the bass chores when the band hit the stage. “In contrast to how Carlos felt about playing bass in Interpol, it’s probably the most complicated, intricate and most chops-driven part of our sound,” Fogarino said. “He danced in between the rhythm. He was really good at writing creative bass lines. Who was going to be the man?”

It was the band’s long-time sound man, Harley Zinker, who had the answer. “Harley had been out with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and said get David Pajo,” Fogarino said. Best known as the guitarist in legendary math rock band Slint, Pajo had played in a handful of bands since Slint’s break-up, including Tortoise, Stereolab, Zwan and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

“We had two rehearsals with David to get his feet wet, and he knew the songs better than I did, especially material we hadn’t played in ages,” Fogarino said. “He’s kind of a mockingbird, except that he doesn’t just replicate, he really can feel the song and the part and how it should be played, he doesn’t just hit the notes. As soon as he played some shows, I knew everything was going to be fine.”

In fact, not only was there no backlash from Carlos D fans, Fogarino said people were screaming Pajo’s name. But he wasn’t the only addition. Interpol also added School of Seven Bells’ keyboardist/vocalist Brandon Curtis to the line-up, supporting Banks on backing vocals and playing keyboard for what would usually be handled with a sequencer. “That was a real thrill to have live keyboards,” Fogarino said. “The dynamic has changed for the better.”

But he added, the real question is how the new players will fit in when it comes time to write new material. “If we can take anything away from the live experience, we’ll be fine.”

Fogarino fondly remembered the last time Interpol played Omaha, during a blizzard at Sokol Underground in January 2003. “Back then, we were still loading our own gear, and we were loading out in a foot of snow,” he said. “I remember I snagged a really cool, screen-printed Low poster.”

Fogarino said there’s a chance you might hear some songs from that ’03 show at Slowdown Feb. 9. “The set list is constantly growing and we’re digging deeper to material we haven’t played in years,” he said. “We’ll be going from a 7,000-capacity venue one night to 650-capacity venue the next. For us to hit such a small stage, we’ll be on fire.”

Interpol plays with School of Seven Bells, Wednesday, Feb. 9, at Slowdown, 729 No. 14th St. Showtime is 9 p.m. This show is sold out. For more information, visit theslowdown.com.

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There was so much more with Sam Fogarino that I’ll be posting a “Pt. 2” of this story next week that covers his work with Athens, Georgia band Twin Tigers.

And since we’ve been talking so much about Carlos D., you might as well read this 2003 Lazy-i interview with Carlos, online here.

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Tomorrow, a look inside 89.7 The River’s New Day Rising.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Column 307: A Kind of Homecoming
Local boy Andy Norman launches hearnebraska.org

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

To understand the vision for HearNebraska.org — the new online music-directed website that is more than a website — you must understand its creator, Andy Norman.

HearNebraska.org launched Monday morning. I’m not going to go into great detail here about the site because you can discover its multitudes on your own simply by typing hearnebraska.org into your browser. I will tell you that its goal is to provide resources and a voice for bands, artists and members of Nebraska’s creative class — as well as the businesses that support them — in an effort to make the state a globally recognized cultural destination. I know that because I helped write the mission statement.

Full disclosure: I’m on the HearNebraska.org Board of Directors, so bally-hooing the site will seem somewhat self-congratulatory until you realize I get nothing from its success other than knowing that Andy and his lovely wife, Angie, are one step closer on their quest to acquire health insurance.

It didn’t have to be that way. Norman could be sitting in a fancy office on K St. in Washington, D.C., right now contemplating his next deadline had he followed his initial career path.

OK, let’s start at the beginning.

Shortly after graduating with a degree in journalism from University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2003, Norman headed to Omaha to work with former Omaha World-Herald columnist Jim Minge and a cadre of others (including The Reader‘s own Eric Stoakes) to create Omaha City-Weekly, an alt-weekly competitor to The Reader, in 2004. His tenure as managing editor at OCW was short-lived, as he ended up at The Reader in June 2005, where, among other things, Norman was my boss as the paper’s managing editor.

Three years’ worth of deadlines later, and Norman left The Reader in May 2008. “I was looking for a new challenge and didn’t want to work for any other paper or alt weekly,” he said. “I just wanted to go back to school.”

He found a program that offered a Master’s in Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. “Basically, they teach you how to find and produce environmental stories by taking dry science and making it compelling,” he said. Norman paid his tuition by working as a grad assistant and editor of MSU’s award-winning EJ Magazine. He went on to spend the summer of ’09 covering environmental legislation on Capital Hill for Congressional Quarterly.

It all sounds very impressive, doesn’t it? “I had picked environmental journalism because I was trying to position myself and my career,” Norman said. “I wanted to learn about new media; I wanted to know how to transition in a rough journalism climate that hadn’t even gotten rough yet. I thought I was ahead of the curve.”

But something funny happened on the way to picking up his future Pulitzers — the economy died, along with journalism. “The housing bubble busted and the economy went to shit and no was buying newspapers anymore,” Norman said. “It was all about sports and entertainment. Lifestyle reporting was safe. Environmental journalists and foreign correspondents were disposable.”

Norman hadn’t even graduated from MSU yet and he was already second-guessing a career in environmental journalism. Instead, he and Angie were having drinks in a dive bar in Lansing and the conversation turned as it always did, to Nebraska music.

“We talked about how no one in Michigan knew about Nebraska music, and if they did know something it was only about Saddle Creek Records,” Norman said. “The idea popped up to create a statewide website that increased Nebraska’s music presence nationally.”

He took the idea to his advisors at MSU, and hearnebraska.org became Norman’s master’s project — a project that had nothing to do with the environment. “My advisors were incredibly supportive,” Norman said. “They said if you can make a job out of this or if it helps you get a job, we’re in no position to stand in your way. There was this air that no one had a fucking clue what was happening in journalism or how to navigate the waters, so they were open to it, and I had a pretty good pitch.”

Among his biggest supporters were Cliff Lampe, one of the founders of nerd/geek tech site slashdot.org, and Jonathan Morgan, a reporter for the New York Times and the Detroit News, who was behind a neighborhood hyper-local online application.

So after receiving his master’s in May 2010, Norman began to piece together the non-profit hearnebraska.org from his new home, back in Lincoln. Despite the unmistakable death knell of print journalism, with his credentials Norman still could have landed a cushy reporting gig somewhere. Instead, he followed his more financially modest dream.

Why didn’t he go for the money grab? “It’s not what I want,” Norman said. “I want to live comfortably. It would be great to have health insurance, but I lived in D.C. for a summer and worked for one of the best political papers in the country and I saw the lifestyle and how fast everything moved and how much I would have had to focus on my career as opposed to my family and friends, and that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t want to chase those ambitions.

“I’m proud of Nebraska, and I realized in Michigan that I had become this huge cheerleader for the state. I want to help it grow. I’m a Nebraska guy. It just makes sense to be here.”

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Speaking of The Reader, there have been a ton of changes at the paper which you may or may not know about. The executive suite sees the departure of Sarah Wengert as Managing Editor. Sarah’s not leaving town, she’s just looking to try something new. You’ll be seeing her byline out and about in various publications, including The Reader. Her replacement is Sean Brennan, who you might recognize from the ol’ Omaha City-Weekly. But there’s also a bunch of new warm bodies that have been added to The Reader‘s torch pile, including news writer Lincolnite Hilary Stohs-Krause, a name you may recognize from the Starcityscene.com blog. And something I didn’t have room to mention in the above column — Andy Norman also continues to contribute to The Reader in a news capacity — you didn’t think he was paying his bills doing hearnebraska.org, did you?

And then there’s maybe the most earth-shaking change of all, a monumental shift that very likely will have a quantum impact on the Omaha music scene — Chris Aponick has been added to The Reader staff as its new music editor. I’m not sure what his actual title is, but Aponick is now responsible for assigning music coverage as well as writing the weekly “Backbeat” column.

In the driver’s seat for only a couple weeks and Chris already has snagged his first exclusive. In his column this week he reports that Digital Leather has signed a deal with Tic Tac Totally Records to release their upcoming album, Infinite Sun, sometime this summer. This is the album that was partially funded through a successful Kickstarter effort, so if you, like me, laid down some cash you’ll be getting your limited edition copy sometime soon. TTT is a Chicago label whose roster includes Bare Wires, Wavves, So Cow, Meercaz, and Omaha’s very own trash-punk deviants, The Shanks. Pssst… just between you and me, Digital Leather is one of my favorite local bands…

* * *

Finally, the Playing With Fire

concert series announced yesterday that Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings is the headliner for their July 16 concert at Lewis & Clark Landing. It’s a huge announcement that sends shockwaves through the local festival circuit. SJ&theD-Ks is one of those bands that cuts through multiple genres — blues, R&B, rock and yes, indie — as well as age groups. Everybody thinks they’re cool because they are. Huge. Red Sky very likely never even considered booking them, but SJ/D-Ks would have been a perfect get for the MAHA Music Festival. This ups the ante even further. Can MAHA top it?

* * *

Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Mousetrap, from left, Patrick Buchanan, Craig Crawford, Mike Mazzola.

Column 302: From Russia with Rock

The return of Mousetrap…

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Mousetrap frontman Patrick Buchanan thought he was getting the opportunity of a lifetime. Little did he know that the next six months would forever change his entire perspective on life in these United States.

But before we get to that, I urge you to get online right now and buy your ticket(s) to the Mousetrap reunion show Dec. 29 at The Waiting Room (or Dec. 28 at The Bourbon Theater for you folks in Lincoln). Guitarist/vocalist Buchanan and bassist Craig Crawford, who make up the core of this seminal Omaha punk band along with new drummer Mike Mazzola, are once again faced with great expectations. They not only have to compete with the golden memories of fans and bands that grew up watching them in the ’90s (which includes just about every Saddle Creek Records musician), they also have to live up last year’s reunion show, which was better than any Mousetrap show I’d ever seen. Read their reunion story here.

Now on with Buchanan’s version of It’s a Wonderful Life…

Like Spalding Gray or Eric Bogosian or any other great storytellers of the past, Buchanan knows how to spin a yarn that’s so utterly fantastic, you’re forced to wonder if he’s telling the truth. Back in the ’90s, he would call long-distance while on tour with Mousetrap and confess to some of the sickest, most twisted behavior imaginable — all of which not only built upon the band’s already notorious reputation, but also made for some great copy, whether it was true or not.

This time, Buchanan said everything was true, and I believed him. He said he just returned stateside after spending the past six months in Russia, where he worked at BBDO Moscow — one of the largest advertising agencies in the world whose accounts include Mercedes Benz and Pepsi.

“Everything about life there was so intense and heavy, every single aspect of every minute of your day was so difficult that it toughened me up in ways that I can’t explain — mentally, physically, everything,” Buchanan said. “Stuff that would have bothered me before or pissed me off doesn’t even affect me now. All I have to do is remember life in Russia and think about how amazing we have it here.”

His description of Russian life was like a scene straight out of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Buchanan’s office was in a row of giant identical, numbered office buildings that resembled faceless prisons. His daily two-mile bicycle commute was like a post-war obstacle course, spotted with falling buildings and 100-foot-deep holes in the streets. “I would always listen to Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Discipline’ during the commute,” he said. “It was a meta experience of total extremism.”

Extreme, like the gigantic forest fires that blazed just outside the city throughout August. “Because they deregulated their entire fire department to make money, a fire that here would have been put out in a couple days raged out of control for a couple weeks,” Buchanan said. The blaze eventually spread to a nearby peat bog. “The combination of wild fires and the peat bog blanketed the city in toxic smoke. For a week I had to wear a full-on gas mask outside just to breathe. When I walked down the street at two in the afternoon the sun looked like the moon because the sky was so dark with ash and shit. It felt like a nuclear holocaust, like World War III had happened.”

Adding to the conditions was the hottest summer in Moscow’s recorded history. “About 150 people died over the course of two weeks because they drank themselves to death in public places,” Buchanan said. “No one has air conditioning. To escape the heat they’d get a bottle of vodka and drink until they passed out, sometimes into a fountain where they drowned. They had the choice of dying either by burning up or breathing the air.”

Luckily, Buchanan’s 300-square-foot studio apartment, which cost 50,000 rubles a month (about $1,500) was air conditioned. He hadn’t counted on Moscow’s extremely high cost of living, not only in terms of money, but in time. The simple act of making a deposit at a bank took no less than an hour, thanks to the mountain of forms that had to be filled out. “It’s like their whole system was designed by some evil architect to try to make every single factor of life as difficult as possible,” he said.

At least the city was safe from crime; that is if you could afford to bribe the police. “They’re shameless about it,” Buchanan said of the payoffs. “If the police shake you down and you don’t have any money, they’ll drive you to an ATM,” which is exactly what happened to him after he accidentally drove the wrong way down a one-way street.

Over time, things only got worse. Then out of the blue, Buchanan got a call from a former colleague who knew of a job opening at Detroit ad agency Doner. And just like that, the nightmare ended. Clarence got his wings and Buchanan was back in the U.S. of A. with a new, more patriotic attitude.

“I never considered myself one of those ‘America, I love it’ guys,” he said. “I grew up a punk rocker in the Reagan years, so my idea of the United States is more negative — the world’s oppressor. But it’s like what people say who have been to war: If you haven’t experienced it, you can’t know what it’s like. Moscow is like that. The people are incredibly tough, and it toughened the shit out of me. I feel invincible here.”

God Bless America, and pass the borscht…

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The folks at Saddle Creek Records are hinting that tonight’s Slowdown Virginia/Polecat reunion show at Slowdown is bound to sell out, so if you don’t have your tickets yet, you better get them now, right here. Show is scheduled to start at 9. See you there…

One more thing: The entire Polecat discography, including Dilly Dally and the never-released-followup album, are available for download for free at thebandbrokeup.com, where you’ll also find tracks by Pablo’s Triangle (pre-Head of Femur), Thirteen Nightmares (pre-Mercy Rule) and a ton more from Lincoln and Omaha. Check it out.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

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Slowdown Virginia circa 2010, from left, are Matt Maginn, Tim Kasher, Stephen Pedersen and Casey Caniglia. Photo by Bryce Bridges.

Slowdown Virginia b/w Polecat
Two legendary Nebraska bands reunite for one night only.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

When Jason Kulbel and Robb Nansel opened Slowdown in the summer of 2007, it was inevitable that there would be a Slowdown Virginia reunion on the stage of the club named after the legendary band. But when that reunion would happen would come down to timing.

“We had the idea in our heads around the time Slowdown opened, but the schedules didn’t work out,” said Slowdown Virginia bass player and sometimes vocalist Matt Maginn from the dining room of guitarist Stephen Pedersen’s stylish midtown home. Sitting across from Pedersen and Maginn was drummer Casey Caniglia. The only one missing from this evening’s Slowdown Virginia reunion was frontman Tim Kasher, who was somewhere on the road touring in support of his debut solo album. And his absence was indeed, a problem.

“So we talked about a reunion off and on and then time and space aligned,” Maginn continued. “Tim (Kasher) moved back to Omaha in July. Cursive is in a writing phase and not touring, and it was the first time we saw an open window, which has now closed. We’d already confirmed the show by the time Tim’s solo tour was booked.”

“We’ll be fine,” Caniglia said.

“We decided a couple practices ago that we didn’t need Tim,” Pedersen quipped. “We’ll call people from the audience, and they’ll handle the singing.”

The funny thing is, there’s a good chance that the band could get away with that. A sizeable chunk of local talent — including most of the bands that would eventually make up the core of Saddle Creek Records’ all-star roster — likely will be in the audience Dec. 23 when Slowdown Virginia makes its celebrated return to the stage some 18 years after its debut.

Recalling the history of the band was a challenge, thanks in part to the passage of time and the glasses of dark red wine that Pedersen continued to pour throughout the evening. But Maginn was determined to get the record straight even when small arguments broke out over little details, like who Slowdown Virginia played with back in the day, circa 1994.

Maginn ticked off the names. “There was Mousetrap, Polecat, Frontier Trust, Mercy Rule…” What about 311? And Ritual Device? No one could quite remember.

“It gets confusing,” Maginn said. “We were friends with these bands and hung out with them at shows, but did we actually play with them? I’m not sure.”

Vintage Slowdown, from left, Caniglia, Maginn, Pedersen and Kasher.

It started sometime in 1992 when all four were at Creighton Prep. “We recorded our first five songs after the band was created out of another band, March Hares,” Maginn said. “We knew we needed something recorded to leave at shows.”

March Hares was a five-piece fronted by vocalist Jim Robino. After that band broke up and Robino moved on, Kasher slid into the frontman position and the new band became Slowdown Virginia, presumably a tribute to Kasher’s cat, Virginia, who was named after the song “Yes, Virginia,” by another local band, The Acorns.

Anyway… The band recorded those first five songs at Junior’s Motel, a ramshackle chicken coop converted into a recording studio in tiny Otho, Iowa, about 100 miles northwest of Des Moines run by Kirk Kaufman, former member of ’80s power-pop band The Hawks.

“We mixed the tracks at Digisound, which was overpriced,” Maginn said. “So we made the cheapest cassette covers we could using Stephen’s brother’s computer.”

Despite losing their asses financially on the cassette tape, the band kept trudging out to Otho to record, taking full advantage of its low-budget rates and Kaufman’s habit of letting them take over the studio after 9 p.m. “We continued to write and always had stuff to record,” Maginn said. “We’d record six or 10 songs and come home and mix them ourselves.”

By 1994, the band began working with a couple of producers — Melvin James, who was a friend of Kaufman’s, and Shimmy Disc founder Kramer, who mixed some of the tracks that eventually became Dead Space — the band’s full-length debut and the first CD ever released on Lumberjack Records — the label that would eventually be renamed Saddle Creek Records.

“It was Ted Stevens’ idea to put out the CD,” Maginn said. “He had heard every track we ever recorded at Otho. He talked me into it while we were driving around in his Cutlass, this long, red two-door that looked like a Monopoly car.”

“It was actually a Monte Carlo,” Stevens said a few days later. “I remember we all thought they were being courted by this label, and they were — by a couple labels, actually. Word on the street was they were saving these recordings for a record deal, but we had a feeling that the manager they were working with didn’t like the songs and wouldn’t put it out. We reached a point where even Conor (Oberst) had put out a tape, and Slowdown still hadn’t done anything in years.”

Slowdown Virginia, Dead Space (1994, Lumberjack Records)

Listening to the tracks today, it’s easy to understand why Stevens was so eager to see Dead Space released. There’s something young and exciting and brazenly unchartered about the album, from the opening salvo “Supernova ’75” where Kasher spits out the lines “It’s automatic / It’s systematic / It’s hydromatic / It’s kind of tragic,” to the banging pop of “Whipping Stick,” where he screws his voice into a bizarre adolescent yowl, howling “Yeah, yeah I know you’re sick of me by now / Well thanks a lot for hanging ’round.” Throughout the disc, the music is equal parts chiming guitars and pulsing bass and drums, always taking an unexpected turn into some strangely different rhythm or tone. It was punk, it was post-hardcore, and yeah, it was emo, but it was the good kind of emo, the Rites of Spring/Minor Threat kind of emo.

And maybe when Stevens listened to those Slowdown Virginia tracks he could hear echoes of the future. The guitar and vocals at the beginning of the anthemic “Blame” and the laid-back “Another Sip” clearly hint at things to come in just a few short years.

Maginn said Stevens along with Conor and Justin Oberst, helped raise the cash needed to press 500 CDs at a cost of around $1,500 — considerably more than what it costs to produce a cassette tape — but worth it for this new technology. “Back then the conversation wasn’t ‘How many CDs did you sell?’ it was ‘We’re putting out a CD,'” Pedersen said. “That alone was the accomplishment. We had no idea what we were going to do with 500 of them.”

“We didn’t sell them all,” Maginn said. “I remember helping with inventory control in the Oberst attic. But we eventually sold enough to pay back the investors.”

If sales were slow it might be because the band rarely played outside of Omaha or Lincoln. The one road trip they remembered was a gig at a biker bar called Joe’s Pub in Council Bluffs. “The promoters gave us money to leave early because the crowd was going to kill us,” Maginn said.

Little did they know how big of an influence Slowdown Virginia would have on the future of the Omaha music scene. “Well, I’d say they had a pretty major impact,” Stevens said. “It’s hard to get a perspective of what their sound was at the time. It seemed so unique, but it was a pretty major influence. A big group of us would listen to Slowdown and get kind of weird. Looking back, we were geeks about it.

“Toward the end, after we met Todd and Clark Baechle (who would go on to form The Faint) and a lot of the Westside crowd, people started coming out to their shows,” Stevens added. “I never had the feeling they were very popular, but they had a die-hard set of followers.”

It was all over by the spring of ’95. Despite recording enough material for another CD, Slowdown Virginia played its final show at the Cultural Center in Lincoln that April. Maginn said the breakup was inevitable. “Tim was leaving town, he was going to go to school at the University of Kansas.”

Caniglia also had had enough. “I was 21 and out,” he said. “I could take it or leave it.”

But there was no stopping the rest of them. A month later, Pedersen’s other band, Smashmouth, which included drummer Clint Schnase, would combine with Slowdown Virginia. The merger resulted in a little band by the name of Cursive.

Skinning a Polecat

While all of that was happening, Ted Stevens was involved in a band of his own. Stevens formed Polecat after his high school band, Gravy Train (which also included Pedersen and Schnase), broke up when he left for college at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“I wound up at Abel Hall in a dorm with a bunch of people from Omaha,” Stevens said. “I was introduced to Boz Hicks, who lived a floor below us.” Hicks and Stevens were both fans of free-wheeling tractor-punk band Frontier Trust. “I think it was Gary Dean Davis from Frontier Trust that tipped me off to Oli Blaha.”

Blaha was the drummer in Lincoln band Hour Slave that, like Gravy Train, broke up when its members graduated from high school. “I remember seeing them play at Duffy’s and thinking they were pretty cool,” Stevens said, “so I cold called him.”

Polecat, Dilly Dally (1994, Lumberjack Records)

With Hicks on drums, Blaha on bass and Stevens on guitar and vocals, Polecat headed to the North Platte basement studio of Mike and AJ Mogis in November 1993, where they recorded the tracks for their first cassette, Dilly Dally, released on Lumberjack Records the following spring. It was followed by their first 7-inch — “Saddle Creek” b/w “Chinese Water Torture” — released jointly by Double Zero and -Ism Recordings.

Polecat’s sound was lean, mean Midwestern punk rock covered in a thin layer of prairie dust. Like its predecessor Frontier Trust, their music had a rural flair, but unlike Gary Dean Davis, Stevens could actually carry a tune, even when he was spitting out angst-ridden lines like, “It’s hard to repay all the tears that you give to me / To see the inside jokes turn outside in.” Driving their sound was the trio’s superb balance — no one member outshined the other. Polecat was a perfect corn-fed rock ‘n’ roll machine.

The band quietly built a following by performing constantly in Lincoln, Omaha and Western Nebraska. “Boz had bought this conversion van and we were young and having a good time,” Stevens said. “We traveled all through Nebraska — Kearney, Hastings, North Platte.”

Unlike Slowdown Virginia, Polecat even played out-of-state gigs. “I started a relationship over the phone with Dave Dondero and Russ Hallauer of the band Sunbrain,” Stevens said. “We ended up driving down to Atlanta to play with them, followed by Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Ted Stevens in Polecat circa 199?.

Polecat eventually cut a split 7-inch with Sunbrain that was jointly released by Lumberjack and Hallauer’s Ghostmeat imprint. Ghostmeat would go on to include Polecat on a number of the label’s compilation CDs.

By 1995, Polecat was entering the studio with AJ Mogis again to record an 11-song follow-up to Dilly Dally slated for release as a CD by Lumberjack. But the album never saw the light of day.

“I sure got a lot of grief about it,” Stevens said of the breakup. “We weren’t getting along in the studio very well. I was a little hard headed, and it’s my fault the record never came out. It never sounded right to me. Now I think it’s the best stuff we ever recorded. I’ll take a lot of credit for the band breaking up.”

As luck would have it, the day after Polecat disbanded, indie record label Bar None called Stevens about his other band, Lullaby for the Working Class.

“Mike (Mogis, a member of Lullaby) had been networking with manila envelopes and 8 x 10 promo photos of the band,” Stevens said. “I remember we were all in calculus class, and Boz was bummed out while AJ (who also was in Lullaby) was beaming because we were about to get signed. It looked bad.”

Lullaby for the Working Class would go on to garner international praise for its unique brand if indie chamber pop, culminating in a European tour — something unheard of for a local band at that time. But eventually Lullaby would break up, too.

By 2000, Stevens would wind up as a guitarist/vocalist in Cursive, joining Kasher, Maginn and Schnase. He replaced Pedersen, who quit Cursive when he enrolled in law school at Duke University. Pedersen would eventually form two more bands — The White Octave in 2000, and Criteria in 2003. He’s now an attorney at Omaha’s most prestigious law firm — Kutak Rock.

Despite the unfortunate timing of their breakup, it didn’t take long for Boz Hicks to forgive Stevens. In fact, Polecat had its first reunion show 10 years ago. “At the time, I knew we’d do it again,” Stevens said. “I don’t know why we’re doing it this year. It might have something to do with the Lullaby reunion (which took place this past summer) and how good that felt to be in that band again for the night.”

Stevens said he’s been spending a lot of time with Hicks, who works at Slowdown and plays drums in a number of local bands, including Her Flyaway Manner.

As for Oli Blaha: “When Oli left Lincoln, he really left,” Stevens said. “He went to Edinburgh and then Anchorage. He’s really a jet setter. Now he’s married and living in Oklahoma City where he goes to school.”

With Blaha returning to Nebraska to spend Christmas with his father, Stevens said everything fell into place for a Polecat reunion. And what better way to do it than with Slowdown Virginia at Slowdown?

“When Slowdown opened, I knew the reunion was inevitable and that I better start drumming again,” said Caniglia, who works with his father, Jerry, and his Uncle Chuck at Venice Inn. “Everyone I know has no idea that I was in this band.”

But can they pull it off with Kasher not coming back into town until Dec. 19?

“We’ll be ready,” Pedersen said. “I’m having a blast. It’s all brand new again, and part of that is because my memory is crap.”

“For us, the real fun has been being together again,” Maginn said. “I’m smiling the whole time I’m down in the basement.”

Slowdown Virginia plays with Polecat and DJMBowen Thursday, Dec. 23, at The Slowdown, 729 No. 14th St. Showtime is 9 p.m. Admission is $10. For more information, call 402.345.7569 or visit theslowdown.com.

Published in The Omaha Reader Dec. 22, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved. Photo by Bryce Bridges, used with permission. Vintage photos of Slowdown Virginia and Polecat supplied by Rob Walters.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Column 301: Omahype Returns

The notorious music blog takes on a new life…

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Sometime in March 2009, a quiet sadness swept over the Internet when Andrew Bowen and Ian Atwood grasped firmly and pulled the plug on one of Omaha’s more original websites: omahype.com.

Omahype enthusiastically chronicled the local music scene through Bowen and Atwood’s acerbic music news bits, live reviews and leaked mp3 files that one assumes had to be illegal. The website had a wonderfully subversive streak running through it, and carried on an outsider’s tradition, giving voice to Hotel Frank, Slumber Party Records artists and the Antiquarium record store, powered by the duo’s uncanny good taste in music. Over the course of a couple years, Bowen and Atwood managed to make a small but significant mark, providing a fresh, young perspective that this scene was — and is — sorely in need of.

Now, almost two years later, omahype.com returns, but without Bowen and Atwood at the helm. Instead, the Internet domain has been acquired by two other local music insiders — Will Simons and Laura Burhenn. Simons, who sings and plays guitar in local indie band Thunder Power, has been in the music news business for years as a writer for the now-defunct Omaha City Weekly. Washington, D.C., transplant Burhenn is the singer/songwriter behind Saddle Creek Records band The Mynabirds.

The duo acquired Omahype.com through local “youth branding agency” Secret Penguin, who count among its clients skateboarders, The Faint and Jim Suttle. “(Bowen) gave those guys the domain name,” Simons said. “It was Laura’s idea to get the whole thing rolling. She asked me earlier in the spring if I wanted to help with it, while Secret Penguin built the site.”

Burhenn had been rolling the idea of a local arts and music website around in her head for well over a year. “I got the idea from a friend in D.C. who runs a website called brightestyoungthings.com,” Burhenn said. “It’s a curated events calendar where you can find anything you might want to know about what’s going on in D.C.” Omaha, she said, had nothing like it.

Like brightestyoungthings.com, Omahype.com will cover more than just local music. “It’ll include everything from lectures to art shows to indie films,” Burhenn said, “any event that would be interesting to the youth culture.”

But what exactly is “youth culture”? Burhenn said it’s anything that’s inspiring about living where you live. “‘Youth’ is anybody from a teenager to who knows how old,” she said. “It’s not an age thing at all. It’s the creative, adventurous minds in Omaha.”

Simons and Burhenn said they’ll begin by scouring other online calendars for events to include in Omahype, along with (they hope) reader submissions. “We’ll start with events and editor’s picks, and it’ll grow,” Burhenn said. “We also want to be a blog aggregator, a jumping-off point for people to find out who’s doing things around town.”

Their site will be joining an already crowded webspace for local online event calendars that includes the new, improved Reader website at thereader.com; the music-focused hearnebraska.org, which launches Jan. 24; towncommons.com, which provides a “personalized guide to events in Omaha;” the lilting underground-omaha.com; the Omaha World-Herald‘s Omaha.com; the bar-focused omahanightlife.com; local news/events website omaha.net, and, of course, good ol’ slamomaha.com, which has been in the art/music events calendar business for more than a decade. And don’t forget the ubiquitous role of Facebook in keeping people up to speed with what’s happening around town.

Simons knows they’re entering a crowded room. “We don’t want to compete with other websites, we want to collaborate with them,” he said. “We all have the same goals in mind.” It’s a noble thought, but seems to ignore the fact that those other websites also have the goal of being Omaha’s “one-stop shop” — at least that’s what they’re telling potential advertisers and donors. Simons said somewhere down the road Omahype also will sell advertising space, but “our intention isn’t to make money; it’s to support the community.”

Burhenn said that partnering with artists, musicians and “progressive thinkers” to “put a new spin on an old story” is what will differentiate Omahype from the rest of the online herd. That new spin might include an artist creating a photo essay that explores the city from a different angle. “We want to be irreverent in nature,” Burhenn said. “We want people to join in the conversation and be honest with how they feel, but we want them to be positive. At the end of the day, I just want everyone to be nice.”

They both acknowledged the legacy of the original Omahype.com. “Omahype was great for what it was, a music blog,” Simons said. “We’re taking its spirit and expanding it to all the arts and creative communities. We’re not taking a hard-nosed journalistic approach. We want to have a fresh, youthful take on things.”

And while they will curate the site’s content, “I don’t want to be the person who says ‘This is what’s cool and this is what’s not,'” Burhenn said. “I’m interested in hearing from other people what they think is cool, and sharing it.”

Omahype.com’s launch is being celebrated as part of the “Holiday Throwdown” at Slowdown Friday Dec. 17. The free event, which starts at 9 p.m., will feature performances by members of Bear Country, Conduits, Flowers Forever, Honeybee, Talking Mountain, UUVVWWZ and, of course, The Mynabirds, who also will be celebrating the release of their new 7-inch single. Local artists and designers also will have their wares for sale, just in time for Christmas.

* * *

Yesterday, MECA, the people who run the Qwest Center and the new downtown TDAmeritrade ballpark, announced that it’s hosting the Red Sky Music Festival July 19-24. MECA is working with Live Nation to book 50 bands that will perform in and around the ballpark. Kevin Coffey at the OWH has the entire scoop right here.

So the first question that comes to mind: How does Red Sky impact the MAHA Music Festival? In theory, it shouldn’t. Based on what Kevin reported and what I saw this morning on KETV Channel 7, MECA isn’t interested in booking indie-style bands for their All-American family-friendly ballpark. MECA guy said something along the lines of “We’ll be booking the same kind of entertainment that we book at the Qwest Center.”

MECA will likely be looking for the biggest drawing bands they can find to fill their stadium — and other than, say, Arcade Fire (and even that’s a stretch), those aren’t indie bands. I suspect you’ll see a strong top-40 and country line-up, sprinkled with touring pop acts. Think Lady Gaga, Garth Brooks, the American Idol contingent, and legacy stars like Kenny Rogers and REO Speedwagon, just some of the folks you’ll find on the Live Nation website. You’ll also find Broken Social Scene, Killing Joke, Bear Hands, and Wu-Tang Clan. So the opportunity will be there if MECA wants to try to deep-six MAHA by booking a day or two of top-flight indie bands during its 5-day bacchanal, but something tells me that’s not going to happen. At this point, it’s all speculation.

Red Sky does force MAHA to dig deep and define itself in a way that’s thoroughly unique in the festival world. Right now, MAHA is kind of/sort of a one-day outdoor rock concert that features at least one upper-tier indie act along with a sprinkling of up-and-comers and locals. It’s just a big ol’ one-day concert. If it wants to be branded as a truly unique destination concert/festival series, it has to be more than that. But even if it remains on its current path, MAHA will survive and only get bigger, especially after it decides to leave Lewis & Clark Landing behind.

Here’s an idea: What if MAHA became a 3-day festival that was also held in and around a ball park — but this time the ball park is located in Sarpy County? Werner Park’s cozy 6,500 fixed seats and 9,000 total capacity is perfect for upper-tier indie bands like LCD Soundsystem, The National, Sufjan Stevens, Wilco, Ryan Adams, Yo La Tengo and Interpol — i.e., the good bands. Just a thought…

* * *

Yesterday I asked who else other than Laura Burhenn was headed out with Bright Eyes on the tour supporting The People’s Key. Billboard published the answer today, right here — Clark Baechle and Andy LeMaster join Burhenn, Oberst, Mogis and Nate Walcott. Also included in the story is some insight by The Conor himself on the new record. I suspect we’ll be hearing a leaked track any day now…

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Mike and AJ Mogis. Photo by Bryce Bridges

The Mogis Brothers: Past, Present and Future

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

How important is the work of Mike and AJ Mogis? The brothers have been involved with every significant indie music recording produced out of Nebraska for the past 20 years. It’s that simple.

Along with Saddle Creek Records (which they were involved in creating), their studio work is a common denominator that runs through the entire story of Nebraska’s rise as an internationally known hub for indie music in the early 2000s. Glance at the liner notes for recordings released by Saddle Creek’s crown jewel triumvirate — Bright Eyes, Cursive and The Faint — and you’ll find one or both of the Mogis brothers’ names. From WhoopAss to Dead Space to Presto to ARC, their studios have been at the center of a conversation that goes beyond Saddle Creek to out-of-state national bands that are now their bread and butter.

During a 90-minute interview in the control room of ARC’s Studio A, the Brothers Mogis talked about the past, present and future, in a world where technology is making recording studios obsolete.

Their story begins in North Platte, Nebraska, where at the age of 2 (Mike) and 4 (AJ) the brothers moved after their father purchased a Chevy dealership there.  It was in the basement of their family home that they first began tinkering with recording equipment as an offshoot of being in bands in high school.

“Mike and I had this band called Inside I,” AJ recalled.

“It was kind of a Rastafarian thing,” Mike added.

“Which the band didn’t sound anything like,” AJ interjected. “It was a Bad Brains thing, but we recorded at Studio Q in Lincoln, and seeing that process opened our eyes that it was something we could do. In addition to that, we got American Musical Supply catalogs in the mail that sold home recording kits. We were like, ‘Hey, we could do this. This could be really fun,’ and we just pulled our money and bought an 8-track set-up and started recording ourselves.”

The earliest recording in the All Music Guide that lists the Mogis brothers is Fun Chicken, released on Dan Schlissel’s Ismist label in 1994. It’s not something either recommends you seek out.

“(Fun Chicken) was like a high school Mr. Bungle sort of joke band,” Mike said.  “It was recorded in ’92 or ’93. Prior to that we had been recording stuff on cassette decks using a RadioShack mixer. Then I got a four-track by working at the car dealership when I was 15 or 16. Then we bought the 8-track reel-to-reel that the epic Fun Chicken was dialed in on.”

Opium Taylor "Sun Foil" b/w "Livin'" (Caulfield, 1994)

That 8-track recorder, which the brothers still have and use, became the centerpiece of WhoopAss, their first recording studio, located in the basement of their parents’ North Platte home. In addition to that Fun Chicken debut, the Mogis Brothers recorded the first single by Opium Taylor at WhoopAss — a band that included Mike Mogis, Matt Focht, Pat Noecker and Chris Heine. “Recordings done to eight tracks January 1994 in North Platte, NE. Engineered by AJ Mogis. Mixed by Opium Taylor and AJ Mogis at WhoopAss,” says the liner notes for “Sun Foil” b/w “Living,” released on Lincoln’s Caulfield Records.

“Oli Blaha of Polecat named the studio,” Mike said. “We brought the band out to record, and he said, ‘You sure opened up a can of WhoopAss,’ or something like that. When they needed to put a credit on their cassette tape, someone called the studio ‘WhoopAss.’ The name stuck.” Polecat, which is reuniting for a show at Slowdown Dec. 23, also included Boz Hicks and singer-guitarist Ted Stevens. Another North Platte recording was Superglue, a band that included Ben Armstrong and Mike Elsener, who would go on to form Head of Femur, and Ben McMann.

Raw and reckless, each of those early recordings was a learning experience for the brothers. “We never learned how to record aside from just doing it,” Mike said. “We never went to (recording) school.”

But it was a school that drew them from North Platte to Lincoln, where they attended University of Nebraska-Lincoln and met most of the characters that would become part of Saddle Creek Records, including label chief Robb Nansel, Ted Stevens and Tim Kasher. Lincoln also was where the brothers’ next band, Lullaby for the Working Class, formed.

“Lullaby was a project that we did just for fun,” Mike said. “Ted (Stevens) played me some songs and said, ‘I want to do something different, acoustic.'”

“Everyone was very much ‘punk rock’ back then,” AJ said.

“Emo as well,” said Mike. “The idea was, ‘This would be a fun little experiment, making acoustic indie rock.’ We recorded four songs in ’94, right after Ted moved out of the dorms into his apartment. (The tracks) didn’t see the light of day for a couple of years. We didn’t make it a real band until a few folks had heard it and gave us some encouragement.”

By then, WhoopAss had moved to a different basement, in Lincoln. And while the brothers had gained regional attention recording bands like Giant’s Chair, Boy’s Life, Christie Front Drive, Sideshow and The Get Up Kids, Lullaby for the Working Class was the first band that garnered international attention with the 1996 release of Blanket Warm on Bar/None Records.

Lullaby for the Working Class, Blanket Warm (Bar/None, 1996)

“I don’t think about that time much anymore,” Mike said. “It was very formative, though. It instilled a good work ethic. Before the Internet, if you wanted to get a gig, you had to call and send a fucking tape. You didn’t e-mail; there were no cell phones. I was sending out Lullaby cassettes to get a gig in Iowa City. You really had to work at shit. I sound like an old-timer. I guess I am, I’m 36. This plays into the ever-changing landscape of music, especially independent music, which is everything now.”

By 1998, WhoopAss Studio had changed its name to Dead Space. “It was the transition to a ‘real studio,'” AJ said. “It was where we had a real console and Pro Tools, but everything was still in the basement. That didn’t last very long, because we moved to the 19th and ‘O’ location and renamed it Presto.”

It was the summer of 2000. “We had bought a 2-inch machine that we couldn’t get into our house,” Mike said. “So we ended up storing it in Omaha at Studio B, and did some recordings up there and went band and forth. It was such a pain in the ass. I remember going on a Bright Eyes tour and coming back and seeing a For Rent sign in a window in town that I knew used to be a studio that was being built by a guy with the lofty goal of making it the best in the Midwest.”

But because of personal and financial issues, that guy never finished the studio, and had to give up the building. “We moved in there amicably and bought some gear from him and said we’d finish it for him,” Mike said.

And that’s exactly what they did. Located on the very edge of downtown Lincoln, Presto was just a stone’s throw from the Foxy Lady strip joint on “O” St., a non-descript white building that went unmarked except for an ornate “Open” sign and the address in the front-door window. It was where I first met the Mogis Brothers in 2001 while they were recording Austin band The Gloria Record.

“It was probably our most creative time,” Mike said.

“There were a lot of things to learn,” AJ added.

“I still feel like I learn something and get slightly better at what I do, that hasn’t stopped,” Mike added, “but back then, it was more exponential growth. It was exciting.”

“I also remember being really busy because we were the only studio in Lincoln at the time,” AJ said. “Studio Q had closed, and the whole basement studio thing hadn’t taken off the way it is now.”

The Faint, Blank-Wave Arcade (Saddle Creek Records, 1999)

From the late ’90s through early 2000s, the Mogis Brothers produced some of the most important recordings in the Saddle Creek catalog. AJ recorded The Faint’s Blank-Wave Arcade in ’99 while Mike is credited for 2001’s Danse Macabre. Both Mike and AJ worked on Cursive’s breakthrough album, 1999’s Domestica. How well the two worked together depends on who you talk to, although neither can remember arguing in the studio… at least not very much.

“Me, personally, I would not argue, but I’d say what I was thinking,” Mike said. “We would work together on Lullaby records and earlier records like Commander Venus, where AJ was the engineer, and I was just helping and learning. In our professional adult lives, I don’t view us as being argumentative. The only times I can recall is Lullaby, where I could sometimes be, not stubborn, but assertive.”

AJ said he didn’t remember any conflicts between the two of them. “There were times when you would get mad at the band, The Faint or something, and I would come in and smooth the waters,” Mike said. “I had the ambassador role. Domestica was one of the first ones I tried to do by myself. The Bright Eyes stuff I did myself as well. Bright Eyes was my learning curve tool, fromLetting Off the Happiness, that’s how I learned how to record.”

Mike would go on to record all of the Bright Eyes albums, eventually becoming a permanent member of the band with 2007’sCassadaga. Through the years, there has been speculation as to Mike’s role in creating those early records. While there’s no question that Oberst wrote all the songs, just how much influence did Mogis have on the final product? Was he The Great Oz pulling the strings behind the curtain, especially considering that Oberst’s musicianship was questionable back then?

“He jokes about having the best right hand in the business — all he can do is strum a guitar,” Mike said. “But back then he couldn’t even really do that. He was really shaky. Now he’s a very solid musician and plays a lot of keyboards and is really good at it. Back then he gave me a lot of leeway.”

AJ remembers finding musicians to fill in the blanks. “There was always people saying, ‘Hey, we need a clarinet on this thing,’ and we’d find someone who knew how to play clarinet.”

“Those Bright Eyes recordings and Lullaby as well are the reason why I learned a lot of instruments,” Mike said. “I thought ‘I’d like to hear banjo here,’ and I’d go find one. Same with mandolin and pedal steel guitar, which I still never learned, but know how to play. Same with recording — there’s intuition to almost everything aside from physics. Music is very intuitive, every step of the process, if you have the ability.”

Early in the Presto years AJ’s role at the studio changed. “I bowed out at the point where I needed to focus on my electrical engineering degree,” he said.

Superglue, "Circles" "Ball" b/w "Violet Secorah" "<3<3<3" (Novelty Yellow)

“So basically I took over managing the day-to-day recoding opportunities,” Mike said. “After that I did three or four Cursive records in a row, and he did the newest one, so it still switches up. It’s not like there’s one exclusive person, it’s just during the period where everybody was getting attention, I was doing all the recording.”

The rise of Saddle Creek’s status came as a surprise to some, but not the Mogis brothers.

“I wasn’t surprised at all,” Mike said. “I liked that music, and at that time it was some of the best stuff people were putting out. The Faint were cutting edge. Cursive had a great blend of good songwriting and storytelling, powerful rock grooves. With Bright Eyes, the songs that Conor was writing rivaled music anyone was making at that point in time. All of that was happening in Nebraska — three totally different sounds in the same group of friends and scene — the power rock of Cursive, the dance rock of The Faint and the, whatever, sorry emo folk, poor whiney kid… I’m just kidding, but with Bright Eyes, those three sounds getting national attention, I wasn’t surprised, and I wasn’t being biased.”

It was during the height of the Saddle Creek hype that Mike Mogis considered moving to Los Angeles. “I had an offer,” he said. “A guy was willing to relocate me out there and set up a studio, but it didn’t pan out because it cost so much money.”

Instead, in 2006 Mike built ARC Studio — which stands for Another Recording Company. The complex, located on the edge of Fairarcres, includes Mogis’ family residence, a house for visiting bands and the studio facility. It was Mike’s wife, Jessica, who found the compound online. “She forwarded me the listing and thought it would be perfect,” Mike said. “It was listed for $1.2 million, well beyond what it was worth. I gave them what I considered to be a complete lowball offer and they took it, and then lowered it a little bit more after the home inspection, and they took that, too. They just wanted the fuck out.”

To pay for it, Mike got a loan from Saddle Creek Records (which he’s already paid back), and through a bank. “There’s no reason I should have gotten the loan I got for this place,” he said. “I haven’t paid it off obviously, but I make my mortgage payment and I plan on doing it until I pay it off. I don’t have that much money because pretty much everything I make goes to the mortgage.”

It was money well spent. Go to anotherrecordingcompany.com — the studio’s website — for the full equipment rundown of both Studio A and Studio B, which is essentially a replica of Studio A but smaller and without Control Room A’s crown jewel — a Neve 8048 console that was custom built by Rupert Neve for George Martin — yes, that George Martin.

Bright Eyes, Lifted, or the Story's in the Soil... (Saddle Creek, 2002)

Mike said he put a “feeler out” for a Neve board with 1081 modules “because they’re the best Neve EQs ever made, which would rival the best EQs ever made,” he said. “The company I bought most of our gear from had bought a guy’s personal studio in Santa Barbara, including one of 13 boards commissioned by George Martin. There’s nothing special about it, but it was made for him for Air Studios in Lyndhurst. I have two pictures of him at the board. The layout is the same, but it’s been refurbished. There are only a few in the world like it with its center section. There’s one at Capitol Studios, and that’s one of the elite studios in the world. This facility has the goods to compete with anybody.”

The business comes mostly through word of mouth and on the strength of Mike’s reputation as a producer. “I don’t really advertise,” Mike said. “I don’t even list it as a commercial studio. It’s in my back yard. I have a family. I don’t want people just rolling up to my house with ‘I heard there’s a studio here.’

“It’s not even really profitable,” he added. “I’m not running a recording studio to make money. I’m trying to keep it maintained, really. I like to break even, and that’s what we do. The insurance, the property tax, all of that shit is expensive. I have a studio because I play in a band. That’s essentially why we started recording music, and my main interest is trying to keep making myself interested in music.”

Still, Mike said the key to keeping the studio afloat is having two recording rooms. Mike primarily uses Studio A, while AJ, who no longer is a part owner in the studio after Mike bought out his share of the business, books Studio B as a freelance producer, though anyone can book either room if it’s available. “We’ve lowered the rates to make it more affordable for bands,” Mike said. “It’s been fairly slow, but a few projects a month that come in pays the bills.”

The guest house for visiting bands is an obvious attraction. “I like local music, but getting out-of-town bands is really the key to our success,” Mike said, “not recording local bands.”

Bands like Jenny and Johnny, who recorded their debut album at ARC this past February. Despite being on Warner Bros., Jenny Lewis paid for the sessions herself. In the case of Philadelphia band Man Man, who recently wrapped up recording at ARC, the band’s label, Anti Records, paid for the sessions. While AJ’s current project in Studio B, Des Moines band Envy Corp, is paying its own way.

“Now more than ever, bands are not looking for major labels to support art, they want to do it themselves so they can have a more autonomous role over their careers,” Mike said.

“At the end of the day, bands who pay as they go own the recordings,” AJ added, “With most major-label deals, you don’t own the record.”

“Bands just want to find some place to get their music recorded cheap, and then they can license it to a label,” Mike said.

That’s part of what’s driving the move to home studios. Suddenly anyone with a laptop and a few hundred dollars in software can make a respectable recording if they know what they’re doing. Ironically, it was the initial shift to digital recording technology that allowed the Mogis Brothers to get started.

Cursive's Domestica (Saddle Creek, 2000)

“I wouldn’t be sitting here in my own recording studio if wasn’t for the technology,” Mike said. “The ’80s were the glory days of recording studios. To open a studio in ’80s you needed $200,000 to buy the DASH Digital Recorder and the board and all that stuff. But in the ’90s ADATs and D88s were undermining the big recording studios, and that’s how we got into it, and that’s exactly how these kids are doing it now. We had to invest ten grand into some recorders and a Mackie Board. You still had to buy the compressors, the board, the recorder, now all of those devices are in your laptop. And I don’t see it as bad thing.”

“It’s been going on for a while, the democratization of the technology and the ability to make records,” AJ said.

“To some degree, it’s made records a little sub par, even starting in the ’90s,” Mike added. “If you go back to the stuff in the ’60s and ’70s, the musicianship and the tones, you can’t beat that stuff. Technology’s been a blessing and curse.”

But just how good are home recordings? “I remember reading a thread on a discussion board about what was needed for a good home studio,” AJ said. “One guy said, ‘I was just working with Marc Riboud with an SM57(microphone) and an MBox (Pro Tools personal studio), and it was amazing.”

“If you have talent, you can fucking open up your iPhone and make a good recording,” Mike said. “It depends on who’s doing it. You can make a great recording at home.”

But doesn’t that threaten studios like ARC? Not at all, they said. “There is a certain set of skills that an engineer or producer brings to the table,” Mike said. “There’s no ‘Mike Mogis plug-in’ that can get that pedal-steel sound or drum sound or guitar sound. As long as I can maintain a level of quality with the work that I do and push myself to make as good a record as I can, I feel like it’s going to be OK.”

A bigger threat to traditional studios, AJ said, is the breakdown of the economy of the music business in general. “There aren’t budgets the way there used to be,” he said. “There’s just less revenue for recording, whether it’s due to the record labels not selling as many albums or the fact that they’re tied to these major corporations that are losing money in other ways.”

The iPod generation doesn’t appreciate the quality difference between a home recording and a studio recording anyway, Mike said. He pointed to the new Maroon Five album, recorded in a studio, and the most recent Vampire Weekend album that was recorded in a home studio. Both are equally as popular.

“Fundamentally, I think people just want good songs and want to be moved by something, and you can do that outside of a studio,” Mike said, adding that Simon Joyner’s early low-fi albums “are still in my memory as classic records.”

“If the song is awesome and the performance is awesome, the recording quality doesn’t matter because people will love it,” AJ added.

“And it’ll be around forever,” Mike said. “That’s what I try to focus on, and I find myself sometimes frustrated because to me it’s not about technology, it’s about trying to get music to mean something and be relevant to me, and hopefully other people.”

That’s certainly what he’s finding with his current project — the next Bright Eyes album that Mike said has sprawled out over several months. “I’m supposed to be finishing one of the last songs today,” he said.

After the Bright Eyes album is released next year, Mike said he’ll be on the road touring with Bright Eyes for year and a half. “We’re going to take breaks, and I hope to do little things during those breaks, but it’s hard to plan,” he said. “When I get back, I hope I still have a job.”

Published in The Omaha Reader Dec. 1, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved. Photo by Bryce Bridges, used with permission.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Mark Mallman

Mark Mallman: Marathon Man

The Minneapolis singer/songwriter is in it for the long haul.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

The first time I saw singer/songwriter Mark Mallman was at a pizza place that no longer exists.

October 2005. The sign outside Sammy Sortino’s on So. 72nd St. said, “Welcome Piano Man Mark Mallman.” As I stepped inside I was overcome by a waft of sour pepperoni and an ocean of nomming families pushing mozzarella-covered glop into their drooling maws. The guy at the door told me Mark Mallberg was in the next room. You mean Mallman, right? “It’s Mallberg,” he said rather annoyed, never looking away from an overhead TV blaring a Yankee’s post-season game.

Maybe two other people were the in the room adjacent to the main dining hall that occasionally burst into cheers whenever something bad happened to the Yankees. On the makeshift stage, playing behind a pair of shoebox-sized amps on tripods, was crazy-haired Mallman, doing what he’d done all the years leading up to that moment — pouring his heart out onto his keyboard, singing his songs as best he could, as if he were playing to a smoky, crowded First Avenue crowd in his hometown instead of rows of empty tables in a poorly lit “party room.”

Mallberg, er, Mallman remembered that night clearly. He even remembered the lousy pizza that they paid him with. “I had an agent at the time that was just trying to make shit work,” he said from his Minnesota home on a day off. “When you go to a movie and only one person is in the theater, the movie’s still the same. right? It’s part of my thing to work the crowd no matter what. Respect the stage.”

He showed that respect earlier this month performing a 78-hour-long song called “Marathon 3,” at St. Paul’s Turf Club. He ran nine miles every other day and changed his diet to prepare for the endurance test that some viewed as a gimmick, but that Mallman describes as more of an art piece or happening.

Mark Mallman, Invincible Criminal (2009, Badman Records)

“I’m not comparing myself to Warhol, but at the beginning I’m sure people wondered why he was making an 8-hour film of a building in New York,” Mallman said, referencing Warhol’s 1964 film Empire. “Anything that’s new or different is overlooked or categorized, but it still becomes part of history. We forget that (David) Bowie was considered a flash-in-the-pan gay cross-dressing shock artist, and now you look back and say, ‘What a great album.’ I don’t concern myself if a writer or fan thinks it’s just shock. They don’t see the future and the past. I’m the only one that knows the real story, so it’s up to me to deliver it.”

And deliver it he has over eight albums since 1998, hitting a stride with 2002’s The Red Bedroom, an album that caught the ear of major labels with its gorgeous piano-driven pop songs, like the yearning rock anthems “Love Look at You,” and “Who’s Gonna Save You Now?” The labels thought Mallman could be their next David Gray.

“It was a point in my career in the early 2000s when I had a great management team,” Mallman said. “I had developed a huge fan base in the Twin Cities and I was talking to the managers at the biggest labels. Going the major-label route is taking a risk. But I don’t think you’re risking anything by following exactly what you hear in your head. You can look back and say, ‘Well, they didn’t get it and I’m eating Taco Bell tonight,’ but it’s better than telling people, ‘You don’t want to listen to that record, I was rapping on it.'”

To be clear, Mallman said he didn’t say “no” to a major label deal. “My dad would have kicked my ass,” he said. “When it came time to do a showcase for them, I gave them the show that was in my heart, which was wild and drew from Jim Morrison and Johnny Lydon, but not David Gray or Elton John.”

Instead of a major, Mallman signed with respected indie label Badman Records, whose roster includes Mark Kozelek, My Morning Jacket, and Rebecca Gates. Badman has released Mallman’s last three albums, including 2009’s Invincible Criminal. “Now you can go online and download my discography and you’ve got my whole story, and it isn’t tainted,” he said.

But if MTV’s Cribs decides to do a piece on Mallman’s lifestyle, they’ll find him living in a rented basement in a converted church. “Maybe if I lived a bit more extravagantly I would have to worry about the fucked-up music industry, but I’ve never been rich and famous,” he said. “I could totally live in a house and have a wife and a family and whatever; I could have all that stuff and continue being a musician, but I don’t want a yard to take care of. Instead of spending money on a mortgage, I would rather spend it on food and drinks and travelling and recording.”

And maybe because he has nothing to lose, Mallman sees the Internet as the music industry’s great liberator rather than its destroyer. “It’s worth all the sacrifice,” he said. “In the ’90s with the major labels, everyone was afraid to take a risk. Even the indies were following the formula. It was like a state of Martial Law. It was the biggest SS regime of music industry people force-feeding the world. When people talk about grunge and Nirvana, that was the worst. Now bands do whatever they want, from Gogol Bordello to Animal Collective. Without the Internet, you wouldn’t have this crazy music that’s coming out now.”

But what about all the bands that are giving up because they think they can’t make a living playing music? “I tell them to pack it up,” Mallman said. “You should quit because it’s less competition and more people for me. Some bands were in it because they wanted the golden lottery ticket. We’re weeding out the people that were in it for the wrong reason.”

One thing’s for sure: Mallman will never give up. Next on his plate is putting together the Marathon 3 documentary and live album. His other band, Ruby Isle, just released a full-length reinvention of Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction on Kindercore Records.

“Marathon 3 opened me to the idea that the music industry, the music landscape, that music itself is changing rapidly and it makes me interested in abandoning traditional ideas and looking for a new way to do things that are sometimes cheeky and bathed in sugar-coated irony.”

Mark Mallman plays with the Whipkey Three Sunday, Nov. 28, at the Waiting Room, 6212 Maple St. Showtime is 9 p.m. Admission is $8. For more information, call 402.884.5353 or visit waitingroomlounge.com.

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It’s kind of like a Friday night tonight since none of us (well, almost none of us) have to go to work tomorrow. Let the hangovers begin.

Top of the list is The Benningtons tonight at the brand new Side Door Lounge. The band has been around for a little while; they’ve played a few shows. And according to their website recently entered the studio to work on a debut album. The band is fronted by guitarist/vocalist Tony Bonacci (ex-Hyannis) and includes Michah Renner, bass; Ben Brich, drums; Matt Tilwick, guitar; Hannah Emsick, keys, vocals; and Catherine Carne, vocals. Check out the sweet track “Leaving” on their Facebook page. Show starts at 9:30, is free, 21+, at The Side Door Lounge, 35th Ave. and Leavenworth St. (across the street (east) of Family Dollar).

Also tonight, there’s a benefit for the Omaha Food Bank at The Barley Street Tavern featuring a slew of Benson regulars doing it “in the round,” including Korey Anderson, Sarah Benck, Cass Brostad, Nick Carl, Matt Cox, Alex Diimig, Kyle Harvey, Brad Hoshaw, Justin Lamoureux. Rebecca Lowry, Ben Seiff and Matt Whipkey. Admission is free, but bring a can of food or some foldable money to drop into the collection jar. Starts at 9.

Meanwhile, up the street at The Waiting Room, kick-off the holidays with The Song Remains the Same and Pixies’ tribute band Surfer Rosa. $7, 9 p.m.

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Look for an update at Lazy-i tomorrow before you head off for your family thing…

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2010 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.