The Fever

A conversation with Geremy Jasper

(June 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

After one viewing of The Fever's new video for "Waiting for the Centipede" - or even a look at the cover of In The City of Sleep - it's clear that this is a band that is willing to spend the time to do it right.  Any accusations that The Fever is just another this-or-that band from New York should be laid to rest by their eclectic and ambitious new record, a carnivalesque affair which, true to its title, feels like a night's worth of fragmented but mysteriously related dreams all threaded together and set to music.  There are moments of giddy triumph, moments of frantic racket, and moments of protective calm.  The instrumentation, particularly the percussion, is inventive throughout, and frontman Geremy Jasper morphs right along with the songs.  In The City of Sleep is the sound of a band reborn.

Returning home from a tour with (International) Noise Conspiracy, Jasper takes some time to talk about the transformation, which has affected not only the sound of the new record, but also the philosophy at The Fever's live shows, and even his own personal style.  He begins by talking about his striking new video, which was completed without the aesthetic-thwarting interference of modern technology, opting instead for the demanding animation process of the old days.

Is the world of music videos something you’d want to engage again—or was the process so intense that you can’t imagine doing it again?

It was so intense, but that’s kind of what it makes me fall in love with it.  I really fell in love with the process, and I’d love to do it again.  You learn from it; this was my first foray into it, and I see all the mistakes that I made, and now I want to give it another go.  Making little movies has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid.

How did you choose “Waiting for the Centipede?”

I knew I wanted to visually do something like we did.  With music videos, when there’s a hard backbeat in a song, the editing is always a slave to that beat.  There’s always this quick kind of editing that locks you into the thing, where with “Waiting for the Centipede,” the music is a little dreamier and has kind of an awkward sway about it.  That seemed to fit more with this style of animation.

Film directors have always been mentioned when critics are listing your influences, and two names that come up pretty regularly are Fellini and David Lynch.  I’m fairly familiar with their bodies of work, but then the other recurring name is Alejandro Jodorowsky.  What am I missing there?  Where should I start?

It’s really, really tough to find what are considered to be his two masterpieces.  Allen Klein—who used to manage The Rolling Stones and was the guy who sort of broke up The Beatles as John Lennon’s money manager or whatever—he produced these films, El Topo and Holy Mountain.  And he burned the negatives, so they actually don’t even exist.  You can only get this dub of a dub of a dub off like a Japanese dub.  But you can get them online or video stores that have obscure cinema.  El Topo is kind of a psychedelic Western, a spiritual odyssey, with a gunfighter as spiritual searcher.  He has to go through all these duels with masters.  It’s interesting.  The movies can be kind of long and grueling, but the imagery is mind-blowing.  The Holy Mountain is another psychedelic spiritual journey, but this one goes through a city and up a mountain, and there’s these people from other planets… you just have to see it. 

He was a part of the Panic Movement, which kind of picked up where the surrealists left off, injecting it with rock and roll and happenings and things like that.  The surrealists hated rock and roll, the surrealists hated pornography, they hated all these things that this guy was kind of fascinated by.  Then he was going to do Dune originally.  He had it all lined up, and H.R. Giger, who did the design work for Alien, started on those designs for Jodorowsky’s Dune.  Pink Floyd was going to do the music and Salvador Dali was going to be king of the universe.  But it just kind of buckled.

Turning to the album—as we could probably both talk about film all day—did [Fever percussionist] Achilles try any experiments with homemade instruments that failed?  Or was he pretty efficient about making use of everything?

There were some things that failed.  He was much more into grabbing a whole bunch of stuff, bringing it in and banging on it—and it might sound good in the room, but once you mic it, sometimes it comes out like a dead carp.  He built something with bicycle spokes, and it looked great, and he was kind of running the drum sticks through it like a baseball card in the spokes—but it just didn’t sound so good.

The album opens with “Curtains,” which is an arresting way to kick things off.  Was that written specifically as an opener?

We kind of knew that it was going to open the record because it is a very, very dramatic introduction—but it was going to be linked to another track, it was going to be a big, lead-off instrumental that would go into a song that was similar in nature.  We kept trying to nail it on to something else, but it wasn’t working and wasn’t working.  So “Curtains” was one of those songs that kept haunting us, because we had it before we went in to record, but it was still very undercooked.  Some days it would sound good, some days it would sound horrible.  We kept carving away at it, we had it in a completely different key, and then once we knew we were going to put “Redhead” after it, we had to change the key.  It was one of those songs that came to life when we were able to start layering stuff in the studio.

How about track sequencing in general?  It’s such an eclectic record; how do you try to find the arc to make it all flow together?

Definitely just trial and error.  Some tracks linked to each other—you can tell by the key—and you can make an easy transition.  You add noise, you build little bridges between them.  The track listing that we came up with – it just had a certain balance to it.  We tried one or two different listings, but this one just seemed to click.

So it ends up being primarily a gut thing?

It’s a gut thing, although some of them were built to go in from one to the next.

Changing over to touring – I read an interview from about three years ago where you talked about wanting The Fever’s live shows to flirt with disaster, to flirt with losing control.  Has that philosophy stayed intact, or has it changed as time has passed?

I think that was very much in the spirit of that time.  That was an extroverted, wild time—and I definitely don’t feel that way anymore.  Things have become…I’m not going to say controlled, but I think we have more of a grasp on what we’re doing.  Back when I said that, we were playing music that was so fast that it was hard to keep up.  It was running after a moving train the whole time on stage, you’re just holding on for dear life.  The new record and the new stuff is slower and you can dig into it differently, it can be a performance.  I can actually hear what I’m doing instead of running 100 miles an hour.

Another older feature that I found on the band—on you, in particular—was called “Steal This Indie Look,” and it kind of dissected your style and then had wardrobe and grooming links for people looking to, uh, steal that indie look.

(laughs)  That must be old and out of date.

Yeah, it was from the early days, definitely.  But it led me to wondering: as someone who is visually minded, do you consider the personal presentation as part of the band’s aesthetic?

Not too much anymore.  I’ve kind of given up.  I don’t take any crazy fashion risks.  I just keep it pretty comfortable.  A good pair of shoes always helps; I was kind of hurting on tour for a while, and I realized it was because I didn’t have the right shoes.  When we were in Nashville, I went to this place called Sam’s Clothing and Shoes—really an amazing place, it’s kind of like a pimp shop.  The woman that was waiting on me was actually cleaning her ear out with a Q-Tip the whole time that I was trying on my shoes.  I got these alligator skin shoes, and it’s really lifted my performance level, I’d have to say.  The show is much better.

Are most of the new songs working their way into the live shows?

Yeah, we’re playing a lot of them.  We have played just about all of them, except for two of the really simple ballads.  We haven’t found a way to do those really convincingly yet, so we haven’t touched them—but we will.

You have a little time off right now.  When you get this time off after having spent time in the studio and then time on the road, do you come back full of new ideas to work on, or do you need to just decompress for a little while?

I need to figure out what the hell I’m doing with my life.  (laughs)  It’s a strange time.  I went from doing the record to doing the artwork for the record, which took a bunch of months, and then doing the video for the record, which took a bunch of months.  All the regular life crap I kind of put in a box and left in my closet somewhere—and now it’s starting to haunt me.  Now I don’t have the excuses of these projects to take my attention, so I’ve got to figure out what the hell I’m doing. 

As someone who likes to draw inspiration from your surroundings, do you feel like you’re able to soak up your surroundings while you’re on tour, or is it hard to avoid the blinders of venue-to-venue-to-venue?

There are times when you can soak it up.  There are some places, though, that can be amazing cities, but the hotel and the venue are out on the highway and you don’t get the meat.  All you’re surrounded by are a bunch of Taco Bells and gas stations.  There are other places that you don’t expect—we played in Regina in Canada, and we were right next to this great, broken-down factory and there were a whole bunch of dogs around, and this cool little diner right next door.  I could sit there for a week and write.  It was kind of the underbelly of the city.  So it’s there when you’re looking for it, but you’ve got to be looking for it.  That’s the thing about writing:  if you’re not in the right frame of mind, those things can go right past you.  But if you’re looking, if you’re open to it, it’s there.

And I think that’s definitely true for our daily lives in our home cities, too.

Exactly.  Sometimes you forget to open your eyes, and it’s because we’re bombarded with so much imagery and so much information that we kind of retreat into ourselves.  But if you’re looking to make something, especially living in a city, you just open your eyes and there’s madness and humanity all around us.

What facilitated your interest in music at an early age?

I come from a semi-musical family, and it was one of those intuitive things.  It just kind of grabbed me.

Were you a band kid or orchestra kid in school, anything like that?

No, never!  I haven’t had a music lesson in my life, but I know the first time I heard “You Be Illin’” on the radio.  You know you’re changed then.  There was something that clicked, and I thought, “I want to know what this is, and I want to hear more of this.”

Did you also know right away that you wanted to do it, too?

Yeah, I guess so, because not long after that, I started writing little songs.  I think children are always drawn to music, they’re always making up songs, they’re always throwing stuff out.  That’s a great thing about kids, and it’s sort of beaten out of adults and adolescents.

Except for drunks.

(laughs)  Except for drunks, exactly—who are children at heart.  I guess I’ve stayed drunk long enough to keep in touch with the kid in there.