Missoula's Favorite Sons
By Gabino Travassos
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Missoula's favourite sons, the Oblio Joes are working on their next CD, and not going to be doing any more live shows until it's released. When they do, when they blow it out live again, I think I'll drive down to Missoula to see them. Between full releases the band has made maybe 30 copies of a CD-R with a couple songs from the upcoming album, some outtakes from their first album, and some live music. They claim to be playing ocarina, guitaron, wurlitzer, steel reserve, broken strings, hockey skates, and gastrointestinal distress in addition to the usual bass, guitar, drums.
Gabino: Tell me about the plans for Oblio Joe world domination.
John Brownell: We're not real good at self-promotion. It's been real sporadic. We've done very few interviews. It's just kind of the way we are. Sometimes for a month we'll play twice a week, then we'll not play for a few months. It's kind of the same way with practicing and recording. We've all got such different schedules and stuff, and I guess promoting ourselves hasn't been a big priority. Right now our bass player is living a couple hours out of town, which is making everything even harder.
It's a part-time thing. Seasonal even.
Yeah, and two of us are also married, which takes some time. And I'm expecting a baby in November, so I've had a lot of things on my mind too. Working on a new CD it's just been kind of slow going. Which doesn't bother me too much. I'd like to be able to spend more time on it, but it'll get done.
Do you still write a lot of songs and you just don't get together much as a band?
We all write songs individually. And bring them into the band and flesh them out. It's mostly been getting together to record that is the hardest part. But we have a whole bunch of songs and most of them are halfway recorded. It's just getting them done.
Compare it to Lo!
It'll be more homespun, because we're recording it all at my house. Whereas Lo! was recorded in a studio. There'll be a lot more overdubs and I'd say musically it's a little less depressing.
You have the luxury of time doing it at home.
Yeah, and the chance to do more overdubs and stuff. The recording won't be nearly as clean. I don't have nearly as nice mikes as we had access to for Lo!. And even Lo! we got kind of lucky. The studio time that we spent there was pretty much free. We went down to San Jose to record it, and it was a friend of the drummer's brother who let us come down and spend a week there free. Which was really nice.
You're in a sporadic period now, was there a time when you were in it full-time?
Yeah. The first couple years the three of us, the primary members, we all lived in the same house. We had shitty jobs we didn't care about, we didn't even have girlfriends, so we spent a whole lot more time just jamming every single day and recording a lot. We definitely spent a lot more time on it in the past. Hopefully we'll be able to get back to that.
What are your live shows like? Do you stick to the songs or do you roll it all out?
We usually don't stick to the songs real close, and it really depends on how we feel and how drunk we are. It really depends. Sometimes if we feel like it we'll play really loud and kind of heavier style. Sometimes we'll pull out acoustic guitars and go all acoustic.
What about the show you're doing tomorrow night?
Tomorrow we'll have to see. I guess it depends on which bass player shows up. Have you ever heard of Cicada? They're really good friends of ours and a couple guys from that band have been in bands since we first started playing, in '93 or something. And tomorrow is their last show, cuz one of the guys is moving. So I expect it'll be a teary-eyed drunken blowout. There's no telling what will happen. Usually, any more, we don't even write out a set list. We just get up and yell out songs and play 'em.
It sounds like you could port over what you're doing into cafes?
Yeah, and we actually want to start doing that. Especially with some of the more recent stuff. There's a lot more going on in the songs and it would be a lot easier to make them acoustic. I guess even a lot of the songs on Lo!, but I'm getting sick of those. We've played a couple shows at the Ritz, which is a local bar, I don't know if you've ever been there. It's a very different crowd from Jay's, but it went over pretty well. We played at a couple other more hippy-like bars in town, and they always hate us. I don't know, maybe with some of our newer stuff I think it might go over a little better with a different crowd.
Missoula's a pretty weird place.
Yeah. It's a great place to live. It has a very interesting mix of people.
How'd you get there?
I actually came out here to go to school, sort of expecting I'd only be out here for a year or two, and ended up meeting my future wife, and my band. And just kind of stayed. I love the town. I love being close to the mountains and the river. I came from just outside of Detroit and it's completely different scenery?
Do you tour?
We've played out of town. We haven't done a full tour. We've played Portland and Seattle. And Olympia. We've played in other towns in Montana like Bozeman and Great Falls. We played down in San Jose when we were down there.
What do you think of Missoula as a place for a band?
You're not gonna be a band here if you're trying to "make it." It seems like if you're in more of a punk / underground band, your options are very limited. And the pay is pathetic. One of the things I really like about it is the scene is so cooperative and I feel like I'm really good friends with most of the other bands we've played with here. I didn't get that same feeling when we played in San Jose and Portland and stuff. It's more sort of competition. That much I like, but it is tempting to go to someplace like Portland where you have a lot more options, places to play.
You sound the most like Montana of the bands I've heard from Missoula. Partly because you actually use words like "Montana," it gives you a sense of place of what you're doing.
I never thought of that. The songs I write I just never really think about it that much. It's weird to hear anybody describe it.
I reviewed Lo! and said something about this "rocky mountain end-of-the-world sasquatch thing" going on.
I think it's mostly from just living here. We're in a more closed off environment than where I'm from and I think the apocalyptic thing was probably influenced by living in the valley here with lots of militia groups and stuff. I mostly just try to tell interesting narratives in songs, and whatever comes out. A lot of the lyrical stuff is different in our upcoming CD. A little more optimistic. I mean, the millenium's almost over, and it wasn't so bad. It's hard to be as dark when you have a baby on the way. I just feel a lot happier these days.
What were you doing before Missoula?
All the music stuff I did before coming out here was completely different. It went from kind of jokey punk stuff cuz that's the way me and my friends were, fart jokes and stuff like that. To cheezy pop songs. I moved here and just started to write a lot more songs.
How'd you pick the University of Montana?
Well, for one, they accepted me. They accept pretty much anyone that applies. I got accepted to a few other colleges, but I came out to look at the school and I just liked the town. I liked the area. I love the mountains and it seemed like a cool place to be. I didn't know anybody out here, which probably helped. It was nice to come and not know anybody and start new. I just opened up a college book and dropped the pen on a few different places on the page and applied.
How'd you meet the band?
When I got out here one of the things I wanted to make sure was I got into a band. It was a chance meeting. One of the guys on my floor liked Sonic Youth, and I liked Sonic Youth at the time, so met him, and he was already starting a band with some other guys, so I ended up joining that. That was the Flanelles. It was three of us from the Flanelles who started the Oblio Joes.
When you started the Oblio Joes, how did you come up with that sound?
It wasn't really a decision we made to make music of this kind. It just happened when we started jamming. The three of us were living together and we just started playing a lot. I think we were listening to a lot of Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev at the time and it's just what came out. We didn't have a set idea of how it was going to sound. It was just the combined influences of the three of us, I guess. It feels weird for me to even be talking about this, and amazes me that anyone would want to buy something that we do.
Where did you get "Flat Earth Defender" from?
"Flat Earth Defender" was inspired by Carl Sagan. His books are brilliant. The most recent ones I've read are Broca's Brain and Demon Haunted World. Those are both really good. And I'm just starting Contact.
Is there a lot of room for riding horses and reading books and introspection in Montana?
Yeah. I just got back from visiting my relatives in Michigan and it's nice to go back and remind myself what was driving me away from that place. It's so nice to come back to a place like Missoula. I just feel more relaxed. I don't have anything less to do necessarily, I just find it a lot easier to live.
I thought it was really funny to see so many hippies in Missoula. How does that happen?
I think that's mostly Missoula. I don't know if that spreads out through the rest of Montana, but Missoula does attract lots of hippies.
And they don't like your music.
Yeah, most of them don't. A couple years ago we played two shows in a row at the Top Hat, which is a major hippy bar here, and I thought it was one of the best shows we ever played and they absolutely hated us. They were screaming at us to turn it down. Telling us they couldn't talk and stuff. And I've been in there nights where there'll be a reggae band playing twice as loud as we were and everybody loves it. I'm sure we'll never play there again. So I was worried when we played at the Ritz that the same thing would happen again, but the crowd there seemed to take to it pretty well.
There's something south of Missoula right now...
The Rainbow Gathering?
They didn't ask you to play that?
No. That was very interesting. Apparently they dried out the Food Bank and the Salvation Army and the people that were going there would come in to Missoula and make the rounds, the Food Bank, the Pavrell Center (?), and the Salvation Army and eventually they were all running out of their food for people that probably should really be getting it.
Yeah, Missoula's a small place. It's odd to see people begging for change on the street. It's funny to see people come to your town just to mooch.
I guess we get a lot of people who ride the rails. From all ages. There was some show on PBS about people who ride the rails and one big segments of the show was showing Missoula. I think we get a lot of those kids too, who just ride the rails around and bum change. And drink a lot.
That sounds kind of ideal, actually. How come I'm not doing that?
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