Last weekend Back To Junk played with Lee Ranaldo and William Lee Hooker. Back To Junk are double-degree first-year Dave Reminick (saxophone), college sophomore Peter Witte (guitar), conservatory sophomores Brian Chase (drums) and Allan Baker (piano) and college senior Rob Lehman (bass). In the pseudo kitchen that is a nameless room in Wilder, Noah Mewborn got back to facts with the band members.
Noah Mewborn: To the people who don't know you yet, how would you describe yourselves? As a group...
Brian Chase: Bluesy.
NM: Bluesy?
Rob Lehman: We do free jazz and noise stuff, now. That's not what we did before.
NM: How long has the free jazz element of the band been together, as opposed to the original band?
Allan Baker: About a month and a half.
BC: Yeah, probably about a month.
Dave Reminick: I think, a month.
Peter Witte: I'll go with the month.
NM: That's the free jazz part, then.
RL: You should say, "free jazz and noise;" otherwise people aren't going to understand.
DR: Yeah, I'm not sure it's really free jazz, as much as it is free improvisation.
RL: Atonal free improvisation.
NM: So why did you guys start doing free jazz and quit doing the garage-rock stuff from before?
RL: Because our vocalist went away to Europe.
BC: And the best music played without a vocalist is free jazz.
AB: Yeah.
NM: What changes have been made in the lineup to supplement the new free jazz sound?
RL: Originally, it was me and Peter and Brian and Nate, but now he's gone - and Dave played some songs with us as well - and now Allan plays with us as well and Dave has an expanded role.
NM: Do you think the transition went well, from what you were playing to what you are? I know you had the extended noise sections of the previous Back To Junk's songs.
BC: Oh, yeah.
RL: I think that the two genres of music are probably closer in proximity than a lot of people realize. It's all about the attitude that you approach the music with.
NM: Would you say that you are alone in your genre? Are there other free jazz groups on campus?
PW: We're the only good free jazz on campus.
DR: I was told that some of the jazz combos in the Con do some pretty wild stuff, or at least one...
NM: How did you get your name?
RL: It's from a Birthday Party song, "Dead Joe": "...junk sculpture - turning back to junk." But I don't know if we're staying with the name, because our sound is so radically different from our other sound, I guess, though I think the philosophy behind it remains intact.
BC: The spirit's still there.
NM: How did you manage to get the Lee Ranaldo gig?
BC: Oh, that was good.
RL: We made a tape. We gave tapes to people on Concert Board.
NM: Did you enjoy that show?
BC: Oh yeah.
PW: Yeah.
RL: Except that Lee Ranaldo played for like fifteen minutes. But he was old, so that was expected.
NM: So you'd do it again?
RL: No, fuck him, he's a bitch. [Laughter.]
DR: Well, we were both free improv, but both radically different styles. His was more of a loop type thing, with more of a textural basis. Ours was more of a theme-oriented thing, maybe.
NM: What did you think of the show?
BC: It was great.
RL: I think Lee Ranaldo's amazing. And I think William Hooker is just an incredible drummer. I thought it was too bad, that I think 99 percent of the people there knew who Lee Ranaldo was, from Sonic Youth, and had no idea who William Hooker was. And that's kind of unfortunate.
NM: What got you interested in free jazz?
RL: I think we all come to it from pretty different angles. I really have no jazz background whatsoever.
AB: I grew up listening to jazz, my dad played jazz. I remember before I remember anything else, listening to 'Trane and Miles, etc. That's where I'm from.
BC: I think my background goes into both rock and jazz. I listen to them both, and free jazz just seemed like something that went along with jazz.
RL: I grew up listening to older punk stuff, Black Flag, the Stooges, bands like that. The closest I probably got to jazz was the saxophone meltdowns and Funhouse. I really didn't have any jazz background. I always liked noise stuff.
DR: I guess I grew up listening to bluegrass, and a lot of classical - my grandmother always played a lot of Debussy, stuff like that. When I started listening to jazz, I made a pretty quick transition to free jazz. Like Cecil Taylor, that was probably the first name from that scene that I listened to. After that I got interested in noise music. It was all pretty sudden, over about a year or two.
PW: I grew up listening to classic rock. I played jazz throughout high school, and studied jazz. I played in the jazz band, at my high school, but that was pretty bad. I took lessons at the college but then I quit; I'm not really interested in the standard jazz tunes anymore. I just like the free improvisational stuff.
NM: Could you talk a little about what you played at the show, and either how it worked, or how it came off?
BC: Well, the whole thing was written out.
BC: Some girl said she was "bothered" by our performance.
RL: Yeah! Something about how we hadn't transcribed all of the song and written it out and rehearsed it over and over...
AB: I don't think it was that, I just think it was that she didn't...like it.
RL: Yeah, but it's like, everyone at this school wants to be avant-garde as hell. So if they don't like something, it has to be a collection of "technical concerns," like, "usually I enjoy music of this sort, but this particular time, I felt it came off in this or that way, and I felt perhaps if..." you know, instead of saying, "it was kind of grating," "it was kind of loud," "I'm kind of a pussy..."
All: [Laughter]
RL: No, I mean, seriously, people want to have this really positive response to avant-garde or noise music here. I think that a good proportion of people standing there watching us probably didn't enjoy it. But they weren't gonna leave.
BC: They think they should stay for some reason.
NM: So do you think there's much of an audience for this, at this school, a true audience?
RL: Well, there's five of us, and we all have friends. They'll come and see us. Already that constitutes a decent sized audience, for an Oberlin band. If you're playing a party, you have a captive audience, and if you're opening for Lee Ranaldo, basically you have a captive audience. I don't even think it's an issue. We don't have any lyrics for people to sing along with us. But we can go in different directions.
Back To Junk will probably be playing a lot of campus parties in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled.
Bringin' in the noise: Back to Junk kicks it with their new free jazz styles as they join the cozy avant-garde musical environment of Oberlin. (photo by Noah Mewborn)
Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 126, Number 17, March 6, 1998
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