Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound
(September 2010)
We live in the desert wasteland. Ask any one of the four members of Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound, the loudest, most symbiotically related band you haven’t started listening to yet. Have you seen twins finish each others’ sentences or couples that have the same physical gesticulations? JMTSS is like that, only there are four of them and they wear thick black suits and way farers and, though they collectively have an encyclopedic reference capacity that is academically intimidating, they are genuinely best friends in the way that when you’re in eighth grade you think all rock bands should be.
It’s Sunday at 3:00 p.m. in a hidden Silver Lake hills house, owned by Ah Ritualism owner and manager Ruha (the magnificent). We’re nestled around a solid knobby wood table on the grassy deck of the Ah Ritualism headquarters and the boys of JMTSS drink beers and mimosas and smoke endlessly. Ruha offers a great big hug and fresh Persian savories and I am quick to see that the mission of JMTSS is measured more in an expression of an ineffable identity than decibel units.
Though they spend most of their time with one another, the boys do not live together – two live in Los Angeles and two still linger in the IE, affectionately and frequently referred to as the desert wasteland, an arid and ashy remnant that inspires their lyrics and fuels their music.
They've paid their dues pounding the LA pavement, and now 2010 is seeing them repeatedly take their rock gospel to the road - first as a support act for Silversun Pickups and Against Me! and now, starting in September, a sweet spot in front of Drive-By Truckers.
Luis Perez offers: All of Southern California is a desert wasteland to us.
The Red Alert: Why?
Luis: It’s hot. It’s sticky. And it smells. It was a desert wasteland before people got here and they tried to make it not a desert wasteland and it’s still a desert wasteland in every single way. You can put up as many trees as you want. You can build as many manufactured parks as you want. But it’s not gonna take away from the fact that this was all Death Valley.
Now’s an appropriate time to comment on the rivers of sweat rolling down Luis’ forehead behind his vintage glasses as we sit under a row of green trees overlooking Silver Lake reservoir in what can only be described as one of Los Angeles’ most beautiful oases, an architectural feat of a home nestled on the steepest hill south of Lombard Street. Desert wasteland or not, the home of Ah Ritualism is a gift from god for these four. They come to this house to play together, not to work. And the two still in the IE come into Los Angeles about four times a week to write their new record, six of which are locked, with four in progress.
When can we expect a release?
Luis: Oh about six years? But and we’re doing a seven inch; a double A side seven inch within the next month with two of the newest songs.
Ramiro Zapata: There’s talk of it being triangle. I want it to be triangle shaped.
Luis: I wanted an octagon but I got voted out.
Anything but a square.
Luis: Never a square.
Ramiro: No squares allowed.
We talk about the July 9, 2010 show at Synch Space and everyone agrees it was one of their best recent shows and we talk about how they work so well together.
Sergio Camarena: Before this was a band, Ramiro, Adrian, and I went to high school together. We were just quick friends from the beginning. Luis came to us through Ramiro. We’ve always been tightknit with each other as a band. Even outside of performances, we’re always together. We’re really our only friends.
Luis: We’ve had several other players play with us.
Sergio: Yes, but this has been the core group the majority of the time.
On influences of their pre-band youth, parents played a big role. Sergio’s accredited with being the band’s official Beatles aficionado.
Luis: My mom really loved Depeche Mode and OMD, New Order, and all of the synth pop. I grew up listening to that and Dr. Dre.
You played both sides. Oh, yes, The Chronic.
Luis: Seriously, that’s up with Dark Side of the Moon with me.
So your mom had good musical taste and then you knew you wanted to play music?
Luis: I’ve always wanted to be in a synth band. I’ve never had a punk phase. [Well] our first record [Shit vs. Fan] was a hardcore punk record. I just did it because I wanted to hang out with these guys.
We talk about the term “fan” coming from fanaticism and the boys light up with tales, some good, some not so good. I hear a story about an eager youth that wanted to supplant himself for the recently quit bass player on tour in the southwest.
Ramiro: He said that as soon as he heard us, he knew he had to be a part of us and that our music changed his life. We went to a party after the show at the house we were staying at. He was talking to all of us all night, just letting us know, “You guys changed my life in a matter of seconds,” and he tells us that he heard our bass player quit and that he had to play bass for us.
The inebriated fan comments on cosmic signs and thrusts himself upon JMTSS as their official new band member, courtesy of a ride to the next city (Flagstaff, 12 hours by car) from his mom. This unwanted invitation may or may not have come from a Nyquil-ed up Ramiro who unwittingly celebrated the adulation, thus delivering a mixed message about whether the cosmic signs were, in fact, pointing in the right direction. After a series of phone calls and scratching of heads, the band comes to know that this kid is hot on their trail and is, indeed, only hours away from what he thinks will be his first gig with his messiahs.
Ramiro: We get to Flagstaff and we’re waiting for him to show up. We’re in this coffee shop waiting for the venue to open. The doors of the coffee shop bust wide open. In comes this kid, holding a small bass amp and his bass strapped to his back and he looks right at Adrian and says, “Are we ready to fucking do this?!” It was quite an entrance. .. When the venue opens, he gets up on stage and plays some Rage Against The Machine songs to show us he has the chops. We were like, “Look man, it’s not gonna happen. You don’t know any of our songs.” He gets mad and wanders around Flagstaff, gathers as many homeless people together as he can, which is quite a feat because there aren’t that many homeless people in Flagstaff, and he shows back up with five or six homeless guys, and gets them into the show. Then he starts pushing people around and trying to fight a skinhead guy. … Just being a shit starter…. The last words he said to us as he was walking away was, “I’ll see ya on the road bitches” and he throws us a peace sign.
You kind of have to admire his balls, though his confidence and his craziness seem to have had competing interests at that point.
Sergio: In retrospect, maybe we admire him, but at the time it was kind of scary.
I’m told about the muse for the JMTSS song, “Janessa Sais Quoi,” a wanderer from Alaska that was trying to get anywhere else and the boys get quiet and lament her story and her desperation. It’s sweet the way they defend her and the way they want to take care of her but can’t and we discuss their uncanny ability to attract the crazies.
Luis: There’s a guy that’s known [our band] forever and used to see our shows when we were in Riverside when we used to be a hard core band.
Ramiro: He got drunk and he was very excited to see us and he was sending us MySpace messages saying he was coming and that he was excited. When we started playing, he was up at the stage and he kept grabbing Luis’ legs and calling him Adrian.
Luis: He wanted to tell me to play a song and I kept telling him I’m not Adrian. He left and came back and completely cut off everything that connects through the computer. I run the vocals through it, and the beats and the synths. Everything, basically. As soon as he did that, we had like 10 minutes of fixing it. It was cool because the crowd was very cool about it. … It gave me some hope for Los Angeles.
Sergio: I heard from the guy like four days later, and he was like, “Hey man, I’m really sorry about the Spaceland show. Walking out of Spaceland, I was really really wasted and I split my head open and lost a lot of blood.” He got staples in his head.
Luis: We’re thinking about toning it down it down a bit. All acoustic guitars. [Laughing]
On their myriad permutations before this current one, I’m given a hodge podge of descriptions but Ramiro gives up the most succinct.
Ramiro: It was the most dissonant, scary and sad music that we could possibly [make] at the time.
Etho Spine, the label from Riverside, still has a limited number of copies of this eerie dissonance available for order for listeners who want to be a part of the early evolution of JMTSS.
On musical paradigm shifts, JMTSS are riddled with them simply by being victims of circumstance. A handful of thieves could be responsible for the sound these guys put out today. Getting their equipment stolen could have been the downfall of the rising musicians but they went out and bought near instruments, learned to play those new instruments, and opted to make new music with the newly learned instruments. When you think of the phrase, “There are no accidents,” there are four black suit clad wearing lovers of Italian prog rock that personify that theory, sitting somewhere dark and hot smoking lots and lots of Camels.
Ramiro: We’ve gone through three major changes. We went through the hardcore stuff and then we went to ill-advised progressive rock psychedelic phase and then all of our equipment got stolen. We knew we had to start from the bottom up. From that point, it was just getting more synthesizers and new equipment.
So you don’t ever just replace your old equipment and keep playing your old music?
Sergio: Once we get it [new equipment], we run the brick on it.
Ramiro: Once we get [new equipment], we take it as far as we possibly can take it. Then it gets taken away from us.
Adrian Laguna: It’s fun.
That’s interesting. You should plan like a massive detonation of all your equipment every three years.
Luis: We don’t even have to plan it. It just happens. It’s happened three times. Something’s gonna happen and our van’s gonna get stolen and we’re all gonna play on like, fiddles and lutes and saws. We’ll see how that goes.
Hmmm, I see a sort of cosmic relationship between your music and thieves. It’s out of your hands.
Ramiro: It is. Once we’ve changed and the music doesn’t reflect who we are anyone, something happens so that we have to express ourselves in a more fluid way.
Now you’re on your third shift.
Ramiro: Yes, and I think it’s the easiest shift we’ve had. It’s less cooks in the kitchen for one, and the four of us have a psychic connection as far as what each song needs.
Sergio: It used to take us so long to write a song because we had so many other people playing with us. But now, it just happens.
Luis: It helps that we all share the same interest in everything. It’s ridiculous. We can all agree all the time.
Ramiro: There are no secrets between the four of us.
Sergio: … as far as music. [Laughing]
Ramiro: We are all very deeply intertwined in each other’s lives as much as we can be and as much as the others let us. It’s important for the four of us to come together with no plans whatsoever and to be coming up with a song six hours later. We all get together and ideas just happen. There’s no arguing. It’s not like that. We all understand exactly what the song needs.
Adrian: There are no internal conflicts with anyone. The only conflicts would be just be [to better the song].
Ramiro: You make sacrifices in your playing in the best interest of the song. The songs are supposedly a representation of us in ways that we can’t verbalize. Or don’t care to. Just listening to our songs, you will get a better grasp of who we are.
They talk about the nuanced genres that sparked their interests and they agree with Mmmms and UhHuhs that Italian prog was a major player. Il Balleto Di Bronzo is scribbled on my notebook with an emphatic vigor. Lists of composers and artists are rattled off in rapid fire succession. The depth of their musical knowledge is impressive and oft a reference skips over my head. I make this admission as homage to JMTSS even though this writer hates being one-upped more than, well, a lot of things.
We talk about their scoring work (for George Lucas’ Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzjXrmwpi60) and they all chime in on how much fun it is.
Ramiro: I still feel like that was the best thing we’ve ever done.
Luis: It’s just fun for all of us. We’re all into film and film culture so for us to just be at practice and to play to little TVs. We love it. We want to do as much of that possible so that hopefully by the end we don’t have to be writing records and we can just be scoring films.
Our conversation departs from the genesis and rearing of JMTSS and ventures in more ethereal (say: banal) topics like band comparisons and how they don’t work. JMTSS wants you to decide for yourself what they sound like and they don’t want me to tell you. Which is good because I can’t. What I can say is that if JMTSS was an object, they’d be either a cast iron skillet or a lawnmower that curiously drives itself. Or if JMTSS was a film director, they’d be David Lynch’s unborndeadinthefetus twin brother. Or if JMTSS was a painting, they’d be a Dali that an elephant painted over and sold for millions at a Sotheby’s auction.
The boys dance around the working title of their upcoming record, The Performant Agony in 12 Parts, and a debate ensues regarding whether it’s a good idea to name a record something that started out as a joke. The record, however it’s coined, should be finished this month. I’m promised a copy of the new seven inch accompanied by a vial of all of their blood and I happily accept with the guarantee that I won’t be doing any spiritual incantations. |
