[In the second part of our sit-down with the Wonderful Spells we delved into the pitfalls of being attractive, getting signed, and really tight pants. Keep your eyes peeled for a new website and record, amongst many other new developments, coming your way from these guys in the near future.]
melophobe: Have you been working on getting signed?
Bo: No.
Jamie Not much yet because with The Prophecy of Smarmulous Rex, we’re not as psyched about that record. It’s like we’re a whole different band now really.
Bo: Yeah, that record, we’re not too happy with the production of it. We recorded it here on Pro Tools and then we tried a little too hard to make it sound like what we thought would be professional and really what it should’ve sounded like was dumb kids in their garage making a record. It would have been much more genuine. We tried to make it what we thought people wanted as far as being professional. It wound up being real slick and it kind of lost its whole vibe. That’s why people think we’re like a twee pop band or something.
Jamie That’s another mistake that we definitely learned from is that when you try too hard to package yourself or make yourself a marketable band, you compromise the honesty. That’s what sells you, just being honest and being genuine.
Bo: Almost like not wanting people to discover you.
Jamie If you show up to your show looking like rock stars, people are probably not going to come up and talk to you. But if you show up in a t-shirt and jeans, it’s like ‘oh, he’s just a regular dude, they’re just these regular nice guys and they have a band’. As much as it’s fun to look like a rock star and go out and, you know, ‘I want to wear tight leather pants and look like Robert Plant’…
melophobe: Speaking of that, when we saw you guys you had some pretty tight pants on.
Bo: What’s wrong with that, man?
melophobe: I’m just curious as to how you pull that off. I lived in Paris for a while and the only thing I could find was really tight pants, but there were times when I feared for the health of my reproductive organs.
Jamie I’ve been wearing pretty tight pants for a while and I didn’t wear undies for a really long time. It’s really nice wearing really tight pants and just going ‘commando’.
melophobe: Maybe that’s the secret.
Jamie Part of the thing is, it’s easier for moving around, for flexibility or agility when you don’t have this crotch hanging down really low, because then you can only move your legs so far. But when it’s high, you’re free.
melophobe: Yeah, I guess I can see that. Alright, secret revealed.
Jamie Another thing about playing shows and what you wear is when we were maybe like 15 I started wearing cowboy boots all the time. That’s why I stopped skateboarding. I started wearing boots all the time and started playing rock-n-roll. I always wore boots. I never wore sneakers until a few months ago. Playing a show in sneakers, I felt sort of bouncy and springy. I’ll still wear boots, but it was fun.
J-Raff: I’ll never give up boots.
Bo: You don’t wear those when you drum though.
Jamie I’ve compromised a little bit with the sneakers, as you can see.
melophobe: They look pretty sharp.
Jamie These are my grandpa’s. So is this sweater actually.
melophobe: Where’s a good place to buy good, used clothes in Boston. I’ve had terrible luck here.
Bo: The Garment District
melophobe: Yeah, but you have to spend a lot of time there, going through the pile.
Bo: No, man, you can go upstairs too. I can’t spend too much time in the pile, it makes me sneeze.
Jamie I’m really good at the pile.
Bo: He is. I’m not. I sneeze.
Jamie They have a half-off sale bi-annually and if you go after that the whole place is totally restocked. Or if you go before that you can buy anything in the store half-off. Even stuff like sunglasses and pins and belt buckles and stuff that’s not clothes, you can buy half-off too. That place is nice. Garment District. What’s that place on Brighton Ave? Urban Renewal?
Bo: Urban Renewal. Yeah. That’s pretty good too. Have you seen our t-shirts, the hand-sewn t-shirts that we’ve made? They’re on our myspace page, you should check them out. Jamie and I have made hand-sewn t-shirts.
Jamie We’ve been doing that for a while. The best one….I should have worn the J-Raff t-shirt. That one’s pretty good. We have some pictures ...
melophobe: Is he your model for the band?
Bo: He’s in some of the flyers, man. He’s in two of those flyers right there [points]. See the big one with the tree? He’s in the tree.
Jamie That’s Drug Rug right there. That’s like little anime Drug Rug characters with the ghost of J-Raff behind them.
Bo: And then that’s J-Raff as a skeleton wailing on the guitar. It’s like an Edgar Alan Poe skeleton J-Raff.
melophobe: When he’s a skeleton he plays guitar, not drums?
Jamie Yeah apparently. I say J-Raff’s the face of the band, whether he likes it or not. I guess we’ll make muppets of the two of us at some point, but I don’t really care about that. You saw J-Raff playing the drums. It’s quite a site.
melophobe That was one of the photos I was most happy with. You’ve got the glorious mane and energy, it was all there. A lot of photos, you’ve got to work on them a little bit, tweak them this way and that, but not that one. It was perfect straight out of the camera.
melophobe: Given the chance, though, you guys would quit the day jobs and just be a band?
Wonderful Spells: Oh yeah.
Jamie: I don’t want to graduate school.
Bo: That’s the point, man.
Jamie We don’t really have...there’s nothing else that we really want to do
Bo: We bust our asses on this, so it better fucking happen.
Jamie If you could be rock stars, what other profession would you want? I’m willing to do it for as long as it takes. If we’re just broke and old and playing bars, I’d rather be doing that than have given up.
Bo: Do you guys have stickers?
melophobe: We’re working on that. Just business cards at the moment.
Jamie Give us some cards, we’ll hand them out. We were mentioning the hand-sewn shirts…that’s one of our hottest merch things. I guess the first one ...
Bo: Like literally the words ‘Wonderful Spells’ on a design of J-Raff’s face. Jamie cuts out of fabric and sews onto a t-shirt. Each one takes 2 hours. People love buying them.
Jamie It’s like embroidery. Each one’s individual. I started doing it because all of our friends wanted ‘Wonderful Spells’ shirts and I didn’t want to have some company print up 100 of them for me and everyone would have this soul-less shirt the same as everyone else. I started doing them – sort of like cut paper collage - except with fabric and then just sewing them down onto shirts. We made the first batch and I made the J-Raff shirt. I was going to sell it, but I had to keep it because it was so good. That was when I first really started regretting having a 15 letter band name, or however many it is. I was cutting and sewing. I can’t sew. But I had to. [laughs] Then I made a really good Viva Viva shirt because the singer, Chris, he was hassling me because I was always wearing a ‘Wonderful Spells’ shirt. He was like, ‘why are you always wearing your own band’s t-shirt?’ I told him it’s because I didn’t have a Viva Viva t-shirt. I made a Drug Rug one and gave it to Johnny Allen, Tommy’s brother.
Bo: You should check them out on our myspace. There’s a gallery of t-shirts.
Jamie: Those items sell out. They don’t last past a show.
Bo: People love buying them, yeah. They’re really cool. Those are the ones I think Urban Outfitters are going to steal from us. You know how they have all those vintage Rolling Stones ’71 Tour shirts? They’re going to have that, fucking hand sewn and made in Taiwan Wonderful Spells shirt.
Jamie I’d like to commission shirts into different hip, sneaker/t-shirt stores and places like that, especially for getting my stuff out there as far as art. And I’m planning on doing a lot more stuff with…I used to do more stencilling. I think public art is really a necessary response to things like advertising. You walk around the city and see these ads and you can’t help but read them. It’s this infiltration of your pure thoughts. Then you’re walking around and it’s stuck in your head. It’s just bullshit. I didn’t walk around to read that commercial. I’m trying to be out in the sun and do whatever. I feel like public art, doing things like that...
Bo: Yeah, McDonalds, it’s like ‘shouldn’t you be thinking about me?’ [laughs]
Jamie It’s a necessary response.
melophobe: Do you guys ever read Ad Busters?
Jamie: Yeah, I have a couple times. I think we might actually have a copy around here somewhere. Yeah, stuff like that.
Bo: We should talk about the music, man, about our band.
melophobe: Well, I guess you could tell us how you go about writing songs.
Bo: Me and Jamie write them. Usually Jamie writes the song or I write a song…I mean, you know, you’ve seen like I sing and he sings.
melophobe: Usually the person who wrote it is singing?
Bo: Yeah. We’ve been collaborating on stuff more, but so far the stuff that’s recorded are songs that we’ve written individually.
Jamie I just finish a song and then...
Bo: Yeah, like we finish a song and then we get together and J-Raff comes up with some really cool drum shit.
melophobe: How finished is it when you write a song?
Bo: I tend to write more of the parts. Jamie tends to leave more open
Jamie I generally will write a song either on the acoustic guitar or on the keyboard. If I write it on the keyboard I’ll probably play the keyboard or give somebody else the part because I play the bass all the time. I’ve written songs from a base line and I’ll write the melody. So a lot of times I’ll just have songs in my head and…I can’t really play instruments very well...
Bo: That’s something very important that I’d like to talk about. I’m not very good at guitar and I never will claim to be. And I don’t think Jamie will claim to be a good musician either.
Jamie I don’t even know the names of the buttons.
[laughs]
Bo: I think it’s very important to not be a good musician because a lot of people get really caught up, and J-Raff knows this because he goes to Berklee and he sees these kinds of people. They get really wrapped up in what you’re supposed to do. Not knowing how to play guitar is so much fun. I’m telling the truth because I don’t know how to play a guitar solo. I’ll just smear something out like [making guitar sound], just because it’s cool. Me and Jamie don’t know how to play instruments very well. We’ve been doing it for a long time, but we’re not very good at it. J-Raff is a very good drummer.
J-Raff: Yeah, sometimes it’s better to know less about the technical side of things because it forces you to learn your own way of doing things.
Bo: See, he knows man. J-Raff’s the only cool person that has ever gone to Berklee. Actually, Apollo Sunshine went there. But that’s it. It’s like, if you go there and you’re a drummer, you’re going to come out and try to be like a disco-calypso guy or like playing medieval time signatures. [laughs] Baroque jazz. J-Raff doesn’t let that stuff get into his brain. He just rocks. He’s the most solid drummer ever. When we record, he can do 20 takes in a row and play the exact same thing every time. He never messes up. We’re pretty tight together. Especially him and Jamie have been playing together since they were 15. That’s a long time now.
Jamie It’s kind of funny the way that we all started playing. Bo played the guitar since he was young. I wanted to play the guitar, but I wasn’t allowed. Bo wouldn’t let me because I’d be copying him.
Bo: I didn’t want him to copy me so he played the bass.
Jamie I started playing the bass when I was in 4th or 5th grade because of the Go Go’s. Then, me and J-Raff have been best friends since the first day of kindergarten. At some point, I guess we were 13 or 14 and I was like, ‘J-Raff, you gotta start playing the drums’. All I wanted to do is have a band and I played bass. So I asked J-Raff if he’d play the drums. It’s funny how it all worked out like that. Now it’s the band.
melophobe: Do you ever think that not having the technical knowledge will hold you back later on?
Jamie No, because we’ve learned so much.
Bo: What I mean about not knowing how to play guitar is like….I can play some pretty cool stuff, I just don’t know like mixolydian mode scales and weird crap like that. I couldn’t sit down in a blues jam at Johnny D’s on Wednesday night and jam. I’m not a very good jammer or good at improvising things. But no, we both write some cool stuff.
Jamie I could write some crazy thing to play and it might be really hard, but I couldn’t do it on the spot.
Bo: No, I’ve done some stuff on guitar that I really like. I think it’s because it’s kind of throw away stuff because I don’t really care about it. I kind of wish that was more my approach to everything. It’s better to not take things that seriously. Then you’re a lot freer with the stuff. Sometimes with singing even, recording, I get real stressed because I’m like ‘ah, I sound like a chump.’ I don’t think I sound good. It’s like, you should sing like a complete maniac.You should just sing like a weirdo.
Jamie As far as not being good at improvising and the way that we’ve been writing songs, to get back to that...we’ve had a couple of times when we’ve written on the spot and they tend to be more elemental in their arrangements. And they’re more solid. And that’s what comes across live really well. If you sit down at your little home studio and you meticulously craft all these arrangements, they’re not going to come across live unless...
Bo: That was a big problem for us for a long time. All our songs were like Pet Sounds compositions. There’s one or two songs like that on that record right there [points to The Prophecy…] and even earlier stuff that you probably will never hear. For a long time we were forcing ourselves to play these irrationally complicated things and on stage we were frozen, looking at our hands, trying to ...it was just so stupid. We were so dumb. I don’t want to go see Einstein buttoning his pants on stage. I want to see a band being a band.
Jamie I think one thing that I really look forward to is spending time as a three piece. I love arrangements and lushness and having a fourth member, or even a fifth would be awesome, but I think right now being a three piece puts us kind of in a jam and I like that because it’s going to force us to adapt and to create. It’s more experimental…problem solving solutions to song writing. A band like Spoon, they have such great, simple, awesome, inspired arrangements. If one member quits, it’s like ‘okay, see you later, we don’t need you’.
Bo: When you saw us we were a four piece.
melophobe: Yeah, what’s the situation with that?
Bo: We’re just not a four piece anymore. Right now we’re a three piece and right now we are seeking a fourth member.
Jamie We’ll continue to record the album with whatever parts that need to be on it.
Bo: We will record as if we were a four piece. I can do the parts, Jamie can do the parts and so it’s no big deal.
Jamie We’ll even throw in some extra stuff. We’ll throw in a piano here and ... things that we’re not going to replicate live.
Bo: Yeah. It’s no big deal. It’s not like we’re going to stop playing until we can find some new fourth person. We’re still going to practice. We’ll probably play right after you guys leave. We’re still going to keep doing stuff. We’re even going to try to write some new songs that are like a little more punk, just because we’re a three piece now.
Jamie Or something that’s more far out and different. Being a three piece has put us in this new position where we have to create new methods. Being a four piece, it’s easy to slip into a formula. Like here’s my song…
Bo: I’m going to do this part. You do the rhythm. You do the lead...
Jamie Yeah. Here’s the new song. Let’s give it the formula. I had this song that I wrote in my head and then I kind of figured out chords for it. I was pretty psyched about it and then the way it turned out, I wasn’t really psyched about it. I like it and I feel like that’s version 1.0 of it and there’s a different version that we need to make.
Bo: It’s the most basic thing we could have done.
Jamie I was really upset at the time. I thought that it sounded like the Eagles. Not that it does. It’s a real good song, but being a three piece, like I said, it’s going to force us out of our element. That’s what I’m excited about.
melophobe: Have you guys seen any good shows lately?
J-Raff: Yeah, I saw Blood on the Wall a few weeks ago. They’re pretty cool. They kind of reminded me of Pixies and Sonic Youth.
Bo: Me and J-Raff went to a party the other night and saw our friends Paparazzi, who are a punk band and live right down the street from us. They’re so good. They’re just a really good punk band. It’s almost like all of them don’t know what they’re doing at all but that’s why they’re so good. I don’t mean that in a bad way. They’re just so chaotic. They just get up there and they’re so chaotic and it’s so cool. They’re just really great. They have a really cool kind of…they’re just really kind of hectic, but in a weird way. They use weird parts.
Jamie: They’re very angular.
Bo: No, they’re not very angular. They’re just cool. It was in a basement. And Pretty Nice played. They’re cool. We saw Pretty Nice twice that week because we played with them last Wednesday at the Middle East. So that was cool.
Jamie I went to this show at the Milky Way a couple of Sundays ago. Viva Viva played and this band called the Toothaches. This kid Melvin, who’s on “The Prophecy of Smarmulous Rex” CD and used to be in our band, he plays bass in that band. Our friend Johnny and his brother Lou are in the band. Johnny and Melvin play bass and drums. They’re awesome. They’re like a great rhythm section. The singer…there’s like two lesbian girls who sing and this other dude who sings. Not together, separately. They play like twee-pop and poppy stuff. They did a cover of “Sugar Sugar.” I’m so jealous because I love that song and it would be way too flamboyant for us to ever try to cover it.
Bo: We could do it. [hums it]
Jamie They kind of sound like Josie and the Pussycats from the old cartoon, which I really dug. I just really liked it because I really like Johnny and Melvin’s drums and bass. They’re like a catchy pop band. But the drums and bass really sealed the deal for that. Then there was this middle band that played. I don’t know who they were and they were really weird. Everyone just sort of cleared away from the stage and I remember...
Bo: Whose show was it?
Jamie Viva Viva headlined.
Bo: I didn’t know about that.
Jamie Yeah, I told you about that.
J-Raff: Was it Life Partners?
Jamie Life Partners, yeah…so weird. You know them? They’re really weird. There’s this trumpet player and the guy does scream-o-vocals. They’re all really weird looking dudes. It’s a four piece. I guess they were pretty terrible. I remember they were up there and I was so entranced by how weird it was and everyone had kind of left the stage except one hardcore fan who was there. And then the singer…I got up close just to see what was going on and the singer started going up to everyone and touching them and singing with the mic against their ear. I had to get out of there. I didn’t want him touching me. I hid in the booth, and peeked out. [laughs]
melophobe: We were at a show a couple of weeks ago where one of the audience members started playing harmonica along with the band. How would you guys feel about that?
Bo: That’d be awesome.
melophobe: It sounded pretty good to me.
Bo: When Jamie was referencing the Flaming Lips earlier, what really appeals about them to us and also about a band like Phish, is that they just have...and I know it’s lame to talk about Phish and stuff like “yo, bro dude yo” but honestly...they have the coolest crowd. They can play a show and just go out there and cover the whole White Album and their fans are going to dig that. Their fans are going to accept whatever they want to do. That’s totally cool. The same with the Flaming Lips. They have cultivated an incredibly receptive audience who is really open-minded and you can go - and I think Phish is kind of lame - but their audience is wicked cool because Phish will come out and do some really silly shit like cover Dark Side of the Moon while jumping on trampolines and the audience loves it. Then the Flaming Lips come out and Wayne rolls over the crowd in a big ball and they shoot fake blood and streamers and there’s hot girls dressed like Santa Claus waving flashlights. The audience loves it. I want people to come to our shows and play the harmonica and I want people to bring weird props when they come. It’s so cool. People are passionate about it. People follow the Flaming Lips across the country, they follow Phish. I’m not comparing us to either one of those bands, although I really like the Flaming Lips. I think they just have a really good audience because the people who like them like them for the artistic things they do.
melophobe: They know they’re going to show up and see a unique show.
Bo: Yeah. The harmonica thing I think is really cool.
Jamie It’s things like that I want to...
Bo: I want people to start to understand us as a band like that as opposed to us being a cutesy band like The Knack or something. I think we’ve kind of...
Jamie Or even like a cool punk band...
Bo: I don’t want to be cool. I don’t want to be The Strokes. Being cool only gets you so far. You’ve got to have a sense of humor and you’ve got to be like...that’s why bands burn out. They’re too cool for their own good. When the Strokes come out and people can’t get enough…people have such a boner because the Strokes are so cool. They’re the coolest people you’ve ever seen, but then they burn out on coolness. The same thing happens to lots of bands. The same thing...if you’re too funny like The Presidents of the United States of America, no one cares.
melophobe: Although they’re coming back.
Bo: Yeah, but do you think they’re going to not play “Lump?” [laughs]
Bo: They’re not coming back for a big artistic statement.
melophobe: I sort of liked that song in high school.
Jamie Dude, I loved that whole album.
Bo: Oh, that’s a great album. We should totally get that again. Do you have it on your computer? [to Jamie]
Jamie No. Do you remember what we saw it on vinyl in Georgia? The first album?
Bo: No. That album does rock. It totally does rock. “Peaches” was pretty good. There was a song “Boll Weevil” that I really liked.
melophobe: I really like "Kick Out the Jams", wasn’t that on there?
Bo: Yeah, yeah…MC5. So that’s cool. I think I’d like to move in the direction of being weird...
Jamie Let’s go ahead and talk about how much fun it would be to sabotage the band. Just be so weird.
Bo: J-Raff doesn’t like when we talk about that. We’re not gonna really do that man. No, he’s cool with everything. It’s just ...we’re not going to do anything that crazy. That’s why I think we’re going to make it. We know all the different dimensions that need to be covered. We want to cover all the bases, you know?
Jamie We have done pretty well at playing everybody else’s game at being a rock-n-roll band ... I’m satisfied.
Bo: I’m satisfied. We’ve tried to be cool. We’ve tried to be cute, we did. We were cute and whatever and cool and it’s like...
melophobe: You just can’t help it.
Bo: We just can’t help it. We’re good looking. [laughs]
Jamie It’s not a bad situation to be in really.
Bo: Cursed with good looks and coolness. What I’m saying is...any young band starts out - and this is what I was saying about the first record - we wanted to be professional because we wanted people to take us seriously. We didn’t want people to say, ‘oh, they’re just fucking loser kids who... I can’t take them seriously, they don’t even have a good record’. We were like, ‘shit, we gotta look cool, we gotta make cool faces, we gotta fucking have a cool sounding record and…’
Jamie It would have been nice to not have gone...
Bo: It would have been nice to have realized that we didn’t have to. It’s not like we’re any different, we’re still exactly the same. It’s just that now I don’t think we take it as seriously. And it all reflects in the way this first record sounds, it’s clean. We were like, ‘dude, if anyone’s going to take us seriously we gotta be professional and shit’. It’s not like we looked different, it’s not like we sounded different. We still play all the songs, but we were like a little bit more concerned with people thinking we were professional. Then I realized…
Jamie We put like a plastic wrap on everything. But I don’t want to do that. I’d rather be doing things and playing shows more D.I.Y, and playing parties and weird artsy fartsy shit and using more theatrical props and wacky stuff, and crowd interaction and not being this polished, plastic wrapped rock-n-roll band. Doing stuff like that, more indie and DIY.
Bo: One of the better shows that we’ve played in a while was at Mass Art. We played Mass Art Iron Pour, which is a big event where all the metal shop kids brew up all this molten iron in the courtyard of Mass Art. It’s almost like a big medieval festival. People are spinning fire and pouring fire. They have bands playing. We headlined the festival. Kids loved it. It was totally cool.
Jamie The whole Mass Art courtyard was filled with kids.
Bo: Kids were dancing and that was a cool show. And then we’ve played shows that were ... ‘oh, it’s really cool that we’re playing at Pianos in New York City, but we went on after a comedy act and there’s like 5 shmucks here and why did we drive down here?’ Dude, someday when people care. That’s like when we were like, ‘oh, dude, we gotta get our CD looking all glossy and then drive to Pianos man.’ What a fucking waste of gas. Let’s just play at Mass Art. It’s way cooler anyway.
melophobe: Well, we have a sort of signature type question to wrap things up here.
Bo: Oh boy, the melophobe signature question.
melophobe: This will be the first time we test it out. Depending on your responses, we’ll know whether to ask it again or never mention it. Being that it’s melophobe, which is the fear of music or someone that’s afraid of music...
Bo: Oh, that’s what it is?
melophobe: We’re wondering, what is your biggest fear, your greatest phobia? This is our penetrating Barbara Walter style question.
Bo: My biggest fear is the closing in, blackness of anxiety that I can’t control. I used to have terrible anxiety when I was younger and I still have these abstract dreams where I’m just kind of in this freaking out state of mind and I’m just...anxiety can just come in a million ways. I could get a disease and the anxiety would be terrible. Or I could just... think if the world was going to end or something. Terrible things that give me terrible anxiety make me...just the thought gives me anxiety. I also don’t like snakes.
Jamie I guess as far as a physical phobia…it’s hard to think on the spot. But one that I’m sure of that I’ve designated in my head that I know of that really gives me the heebie jeebies is being in water with bare feet, murky water like at a dock...not even at night, but if the water is kind of murky and there’s like barnacles or sharp stuff. Walking through some weird mud or marshes with barnacles and stuff…
J-Raff: I guess spiders. [laughs] No no, I’m kidding.
Jamie J-Raff doesn’t like spiders though. One time there was a spider on the snare drum…
Bo: He fucking jumped.
melophobe: Did you take care of it with the drumstick?
Jamie I looked for it for like 5 minutes. I couldn’t find the spider. And you kept checking underneath the snare drum. [to J-Raff]
J-Raff: I guess I kind of fear failure. I know it’s not good to doubt yourself, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I can’t help it.
Jamie I probably have some bigger fear that I can’t really...
melophobe: Express on a public website maybe?
Jamie: No no, I’d say it. I have no shame about it. It could be like some song I don’t like and having to listen to it forever. Do you guys remember that commercial bostoncarguy.com? It had this obnoxious catchy theme song. It’s my least favourite commercial of all time.
