John: Alrighty, so you guys made #31 on the Top 26 of 2006.
Eric: Really?
John: A little under the radar, but you did better than Mouth of the Architect. I did the math and you guys were a B+.
Eric: That`s all right.
John: How does it feel to be a B+ band?
Eric: Well, it`s far better than my actual grades were in any school I went to and dropped out of. So... so far so good. I guess.
John: How`s the tour been treating you?
Eric: It`s been amazing, dude. We`ve been playing in front of a full house of... some people know don`t who we are, some people do. The ones who don`t, they kinda know that JP played on the record but they don`t really know if they like us or not, and they make their decisions. The kids those that don`t give us an honest answer.
John: You guys did a European tour with Clutch, right?
Eric: That`s where we shared drummers. JP did double duty each night.
John: Wasn`t that supposed to be with Antler and Honky?
Eric: No, that tour was specifically set up for just the two of us. There was a tour afterwards that we were supposed to do with Antler and Honky, the booking agent was having a hard time with all the bands and the logistics � the bus, the money coming in. We went anyway, just took a van and punk rocked it.
John: Now �Red Hot Mama� (from Sucking the `70`s II) - whose idea was that?
Eric: It was JP and I. We were rehearsing, playing The Mystery Spot. I was taking him back to the airport in Detroit, and I was like, �Dude, we should do this song!� I put it in the CD player � you know, one of those wired out, drunk, the sun`s coming up, and you gotta get to the airport moments. And he said, �Yeah, let`s do this.� We rehearsed - I think it was three times - for the album. We recorded the track when we did The Mystery Spot. We took the tapes to Baltimore and finished it out. Neil and I did vocals and Tim did guitar.
John: Now how did you figure out who was going to do what?
Eric: Neil kinda had it figured out and I had it figured out. There are two separate vocals on that song. We just picked who wanted to lead and who wanted to follow and that was it.
John: Cool. How`d you get JP to do The Mystery Spot?
Eric: To be honest, we asked him. We said, �Would you be interested? We don`t have a drummer. We need to write a record.� And he said, �Yes. Let`s do this.�
John: Did he have a lot of influence with what you guys wrote?
Eric: It was cool, because we got to write with him, and we`re not used to drummers who are co-writers as well. He`s a great organizer of songs and music. When we sat there, Brad would be like, �Hey, I`ve got this idea.� And then JP would say, �Let`s try that one twice.� And we`d batter stuff around. The last album we did before that (The Last Men on Earth) took us about a year to write, and The Mystery Spot took about six days.
John: No shit, six days? How do you figure out what vocal lines you`re going to do?
Eric: Craig Riggs [producer, Mad Oak studios] helped me a lot with some of the stuff. Usually what it is, we write the album, and I`ll start working on vocals as we`re writing the songs. I had the chance to go to a smaller studio � my friend`s home studio � and lay down some vocals. See whether I liked them or not. Actually, I did harp there too, in a little closet in the dude`s house in Ann Arbor. Most of the harp stuff I actually kept, but the vocals I re-did with Craig, and he was really good at batting ideas at me.
John: And the singing with Brad?
Eric: This is our sixth album, and some songs scream Brad and some songs scream me. �I Can`t Shake It,� Brad`s not singing it. But a song like �Ten Cent Dynamite,� that whole part is Brad. The same thing all throughout our records. Especially since he writes his own own personal lyrics, I write my own personal lyrics. Occasionally we swap, but that`s pretty rare.
John: I wrote you a song for you to sing. It`s actually about me, and I`d like you to sing it to me.
Eric: Yeah, it gets too weird. Each of us has something to say. And if it doesn`t work, we`ll sit down and look at it and go, �Nope, let`s try again.�
John: I checked your website and you guys did your recording in three separate places.
Eric: We did.
John: How`d that work out for you?
Eric: Awesome. It could`ve been difficult, but it worked out great. We did the basic tracks in Detroit, and then a lot of the harp stuff in Ann Arbor, and the final shit in Boston. It was cool because everyone that helped us had really loving hands. It was like, �Now throw the ball to me and I`ll take care of it and make sure it sounds good.� By the time it got to the end, it was handled with such care, it was like a fucking Faberg� egg. People were really treating it well and they weren`t taking it for granted and telling us to fuck off. It was really nice. It was flattering. I`m sure JP`s involvement helped, but I think people were happy that we were making a good record. Each place we went, it was treated with kid gloves. It was great.
John: Al Sutton`s been involved with the past records, but you switched to Craig and Bill Kozy for this one. Why was that?
Eric: Al now works for Kid Rock all the time. His schedule is really full, and the timing was such that we couldn`t get Al to do it, because he was working with Kid Rock. Obviously, we weren`t able to pay him what Kid Rock was paying him, so we had to look to other sources.
John: Do you think you could rap like Kid Rock at least?
Eric: I can wear a beer in my hand like he does. I can rock the beer. I`ve never been much of a rapper. Although I`m a big fan of wrapping presents at Christmas, because I want people to be surprised. That`s my thing.
John: Okay, we gotta wrap this up because you gotta go sing.
Eric: �Wrap� - I see what you do there. That`s vaudeville. I throw you a joke and you run with it.
John: Any chance of doing a live album?
Eric: We`re actually thinking of doing a live thing in Spain. If we can make it work, it`ll be awesome.
John: Now what`s worse � reading reviews where they describe you guys as �whiskey soaked� or reading reviews that say �Not even a stroke can hold them back?�
Eric: Ah, yeah. That`s a tie for first place. �Whiskey soaked� is a big one. The answer is it`s a two-way tie. Any time Blues Travellers comes up also makes me want to cry.
John: What - �They`re like the Blues Travellers, but good?�
Eric: More like �Hey, there`s a fat guy playing harmonica! Look at that!� That`s about different as it can possibly get. There are guitars in Bob Marley records and Skrewdriver records too, and I don`t see anyone comparing those guys.
John: Yeah, but harmonica. And you`re not really fat. More like portly.
Eric: I`m more of a handsome individual.
John: I can`t argue with that. Pete Knipfing from Lamont asked me to ask you if it`s true that you`re not really on tour until you shit your pants.
Eric: That is an absolute, full blast truth. It could also be a close call, but it`s always you`re not on tour until you shit your pants. And that`s not taking this tour as a starting point, someone shits their pants. It means, as an individual touring, if you haven`t shit your pants sometime on tour somewhere, you`ve never been on tour.
John: You`ve been at this over ten years.
Eric: We just had our twelfth anniversary...
John:Factoring in all the times that you`ve shit your pants...
Eric: It`s only been once, but it was early on. I started to tour early on.
John: Is it all worth it?
Eric: Shitting the pants or touring?
John: Either or.
Eric: The shitting the pants is important because it makes everyone laugh in the van. Everyone`s happy. Everyone has that story that they don`t want to say that they did. And then Brad or me will come in and go, �Please be a fart! Please be a fart! I rolled the dice � ow, it came up craps! It came up craps!� And everyone laughs. You could be in a room with ten different bands, all at once. Laughs are falling down like rain. Maybe an hour later, someone will be like, �Dude, I gotta tell you a story.� Once you open up one crap tour story, every other crap tour story comes out.
John: We`ll end it with that. What was your crap tour story?
Eric: Mine is just a typical... There`s a hobo, there`s those things you wear when you`re doing plastering � stilts. And there was a midget. It was just a typical �I thought it was a sneeze � oh, great.� We were in a bar, and generally the bars we play, there`s no access to the toilet and that`s where all the trouble breaks loose. If they give you a club where there`s plenty of bathrooms to go to, no one`s gotta go. The minute we`re at a club where there`s one toilet and it`s four blocks away, everyone`s gotta go. I guess that`s kinda the nature of touring in general.
