The assaults are relentless and impossible to prepare for despite the warning signs of fuzz and reverb, and with an uncanny propensity it penetrates to coax that dormant coal (possibly leftover from the evolution from the lizard brain) into a slowly illuminating combustion that returns glimmering brighter than an inferno to the forefront of the mind, and people hang from the rafters. Thee Oh Sees are playing.



Raw, boiling, mind-moving, substantial, eclectic, and hip-grooving, (and as cornball as these descriptions resonate) it doesn't matter your state–all you know is YOU WANT MORE. What dynamo inspires the production of such brilliant sounds arriving from the west coast? Is it the seize of the ocean breeze? or perhaps the lush topiary I imagine exists verdant and flourishing all year-round... maybe a lovely combination of a pinking horizon and the brine scent seeping into pores while stepping outside and onto the Pacific sand that is the sherpa to the pleasing pounds produced that blessedly reach thine ears… Go. See. Thee Oh Sees. And go buy their new album Warm Slime, out May 11 on In The Red Records.

REAX: How are you doing?
John Dwyer: Good, how are you doing? I was at the beach and I fucking forgot to bring my phone with me. I forgot that I was getting a call from you so…

REAX: It’s cool. You called back. What are you doing at the beach today? Is it nice outside?
JD: Yeah it’s nice. I went out there with my friend Mike. We try to do that a couple times a week. Because we’re getting old and keeping the blood pumping. I was going to try to record all day today so I figured I’d go sit in the sun a bit before I lock myself in my house.

REAX: Do you have a job?
JD: I used to work in a hip hop club here, a hip hop reggae joint during the day, doing the day crew, doing dry wall and smudging out graffiti mostly. Just general repair work. But then that joint started suffering really poorly because a score of reasons so now I, not so much. Been doing a lot of touring this year.

REAX: You’re making enough money just off your music now?
JD: Yeah, kind of, my overhead is really low. I have a rent-controlled apartment that’s Kip Malone’s place, the guy from TV On the Radio, he toured out here and we became friends. I moved into his house when I was in a bad situation. He moved up to New York and started doing that band and I just stayed here. I got a pretty good situation out here, I ‘m really lucky.

REAX: So let’s imagine that you didn’t need money anymore. Do you think you’d keep making music? Would you leave, or go someplace else?
JD: I think I’d probably stay right here if I didn’t have to pay rent. I actually really like this joint that I’m living at, I’ve gotten used to it over the years. I’d probably just record all the time. If people are sick of the amount of stuff I’m putting out now it would be ten times worse if I didn’t have to worry about money at all.

REAX: Do you write and record everyday? Do you have a schedule?
JD: It depends on when it’s flowing. When ideas are happening that’s cool, that’s when I do most of it. We did so much last year I kind of stopped for a minute. We did a little bit of touring and I had a pretty severe writer’s block thing. It just started opening up again recently so I’m recording and demo-ing stuff out at home and taking it to the band or working by myself. The whole set is fairly new material these days.

REAX: Are you surprised by the excitement people get about your releases? They sell out quick.
JD: It’s nice to have people come to our shows. If people dig the record, if we get to play with other bands and cool people to work with, that’s basically all I want to do. I have no complaints. I’m pretty happy about it. I’ve done this band longer than any band I’ve ever been in. I like the crew, I like everyone a lot and they’re great people and have great ability. It’s just a pleasure. This is what I’ve always wanted to do since I was a kid. Once I heard my first rock record I just wanted to do this.

REAX: What was that?
JD: The first thing that really turned my ear was AC/DC. I really enjoyed it as a kid.

REAX: How come when you release records there’s no formal announcement? They just sort of appear.
JD: It depends on who’s doing it. In The Red Records seems to be the most common people I work with now. They do more promotion. The label I do Castleface is kind of, it’s a little more under the radar because we don’t do promotion. I work these guys in New York and do a radio promo with CDs to send out, 4 or 500 CDs to radio stations, so college radio stations have it, but really we sell it mostly on tour. It’s a lot of word of mouth. Because we put out so much shit no one wants to spend any money promoting it too much, they just assume that they expect some new crap to be out in the next couple months. I’ve never been a one record a year kind of person.



REAX: Last time this year did you think you’d release so much stuff in 2009?
JD: No, actually we just kept writing and writing. It was just a really productive year. The tap was flowing. And I don’t like to get behind myself too much either. If we’re playing the songs it’s nice to have the record out. There’d be times where we play a show and everyone would dig one song and want the record that that song is on and we wouldn’t have it. I didn’t expect it to be as fruitful as it was. This year will probably be a little bit slower. We have one more record coming out on In The Red in a couple months and I’m working on another set of home recordings but I don’t think this year will be as much.

REAX: So future releases aren’t very organized?
JD: The thing with In The Red has been slated for a while. We recorded this in October or September of last year. Another big factor in the speed of our record coming out is I work with these people out here called Pirated Press. They have the fastest vinyl overturn I’ve ever seen. I can bring the masters around and hammer out the artwork with them and within a few months I’m sitting on the vinyl. Just have a really good repertoire with the pressing plant over there so they’re first in line I guess. They’re really easy to work with so there’s no red tape to go through. When you’re working with a bigger label you have distribution, you have to, they want to promote it first. There’s no problem with commercial reviews but it’s a different world when you start getting into promotion. They want to sell the record before it comes out, build hype for it. Not that it’s a bad thing it’s just different than how we’d do it if we were releasing it ourselves.

REAX: The new record that’s coming out, did you record it at the same time as Dog Poison LP?
JD: At the same time but a different recording set up. It’s the same machine but most of the stuff on Dog Poison I did by myself.

REAX: Even the little flute sounds?
JD: Oh yeah, my mom bought me a flute a few years ago. My step-dad and my mom got me a flute for Christmas a couple years ago. I kind of picked up the flute pretty quick. Not that I’m any sort of amazing flute player but I can fake it okay. I really dig the flute. I really liked Herbie Mann records when I was a kid. “Going Up the Country” by Canned Heat? and “Wild Things” by The Troggs, all that weird I just like that in my garage rock. It’s like a different aspect, it makes it real summery to me. I recorded (Dog Poison in about a month at my house, and about a month after that we took that same machine and did the record that’s coming out. We just did a release, a 12” called Quadrospazzed, on the same session from the new record. It’s all live to the 8 track machine. The hip hop club I used to work at actually we just rented it out for the day. So that’s pretty much the same time, but a different set of songs. It’s with the full band so it definitely has more of the next-step from Help sort of vibe, as opposed to Dog Poison, which is a little bit different I think.

REAX: The Zork Tapes that came out last year, that included a lot of demos of songs that ended up on Master’s Bedroom and Help. Do you have a huge batch of songs that you keep reworking over again until you really like them? or sometimes is it just recorded once and you dig it?
JD: It really depends honestly on, a lot of the times I demo stuff out at home, drum kit and a couple guitars here and an old amp I can record with so that’s the beginning of the process. I’ll demo them out full band style but by myself and then basically I’ll take them to the band and some of them work with the band and some of them don’t. The home recording is really based on how they sound as opposed to how they’re going to sound live. We’ll go through and everyone will figure out their parts, and it changes, songs change. When the finished product comes out we decide how we’re going to keep it for the live show. There’s some guy across the street from me, excuse me, right now walking his dog, and the dog is this old dog, it’s just lying on the ground, he’s literally dragging it down the street. It’s what I’m watching while I’m talking to you. He’s just pulling it by the leash. I’m sorry.

REAX: That’s okay. It’s a good segue into my next question. A lot of Thee Oh Sees lyrics, there’s many strange descriptions of landscapes. Where are these places?
JD: I’ll write a lot when I go somewhere when I’m not playing in the band. I’ll go see my mom in Rhode Island, or in New York, or even traveling across country. A lot of it is about San Francisco. I live here. I just went to the beach, I’ve always dug these image-matic writers. I’ll be reading something and really be able in my mind to see what the author’s describing. I always liked that kind of writing.

REAX: What have you been reading lately?
JD: Let’s see. I got a big pile I’ve been reading. Borges, the short fiction collection, he’s pretty great. What else? I just got turned onto John Fante. Oh man Flannery O’Connor, the complete short stories collection blew my mind. I had never really read her before. I read it twice I was totally enamored with her, she’s amazing. I got a collection of Kafka short stories which are pretty hit or miss but the good stuff is pretty fucking great. He’s one of those writers that I was talking about where you can picture the hallway, the filing cabinets of the bureaucracy, a snowy eastern European small village. He’s amazing in that way.

REAX: I did not think you’d be reading Kafka.
JD: I like a lot of short story collections because probably due to years of smoking marijuana. I read like ten books at once so a short story is the perfect tool to keep my brain going by not making me have to remember where I am in the thread of the story. Although I did just read, I got stuck in the Philly airport for 12 hours in the baggage claim area and I read somehow the entire, it’s the fastest I’ve ever read, I read the entire Confederacy of Dunces, which I’ve never read before.

REAX: Oh man that’s an awesome book.
JD: Yeah I read that whole fucking book in one sitting waiting at the Philly airport and I brought that book to read while I was at my mom’s house for a week. Great book though, loved it. I basically ate it like a pizza it was so good.

REAX: Which oceans or bodies of water you’ve lived near have affected you?
JD: Oh yeah for sure the Pacific. I love the beach. I grew up in Rhode Island, and there’s a weird parallel between San Francisco and Rhode Island, in a weird way it’s Providence in particular and New Port, Rhode Island. They’re both real heavy in shipping and importing and exporting so there’s all these crazy industrial areas for boating, creepy docks, beautiful beaches. That’s the way I grew up, my parents were always taking me to the beach. There’s a place off the coast of Rhode Island that’s an incredible island with no phones, and we would rent a shitty little broken ass down house for $100 a week out there in the summer. And those were all my formative years, going snorkeling and eating muscles. I just love that. Out here the beach is definitely my mind clearer. I live about three or four miles. I ride my bike there all the time.



REAX: So the beach usually brings you solace, like in the lyrics it’s always safe there or you can disappear.
JD: It’s just the calm of one relaxing moment. You realize your problems are pretty small when you’re sitting in front of the ocean.

REAX: I haven’t seen you live, but just from the Quadrospazzed 12” and seeing footage on the internet, you change the songs when playing live. Is it just fun to put such an aggressive spin on it? is it really important to change them when playing live? or are you bored because you’ve played these songs for months?
JD: A lot of the times too, well Quadrospazzed in particular we wrote on the fly. It came out on the cd version of Master’s Bedroom. It was a five minute long song, just a jam that we had written. We had an extra reel of tape. We try to have an extra reel of tape, that’s like the one time we write off the cuff, in the studio or while we’re recording somewhere. The newer one is just a refined version of what happened to it over two years of playing it live. The lyrics changed, the melody changed. It’s really a completely different long like Inna Gadda Da Vida version of the original. I’m getting more and more into loose ends. With shorter pop songs now everything’s based on cues. The band has gotten really good at just “Follow me, here we go,” and jump into the song. And if it changes I’ve got my drummer down to the point now where it’s a drum solo and I just walk away and he plays by himself for three or four minutes. Sometimes he loves it and sometimes he’s like “Really?” and I’m like “Do it.” And people love a drum solo. If you don’t like a drum solo then you’re an asshole. That’s the part of the jazz record I’m always waiting for. It’s not necessarily important to have changes but that’s just the way it is with us. It’s an old stoner quality that happens when, and maybe it is a little boring to play the same thing over and over again, pump new life into our old songs to lift it up a little bit.

REAX: Since the Foggy Notions DVD, things have gotten a lot louder on your records. Do you think you’re better now? That you’re making the best version of Thee Oh Sees?
JD: I really like that band a lot. It was really fun, but there’s a piece of me that wants to play rock n roll, it’s just what I grew up on and it’s always going to lean towards that. I don’t know if it’s better. People seem to dig it more. I think people want to be beaten with volume. Also there are these moments, there were a lot of shows when we were doing the quiet thing that were totally fucking magical. We’d book a show and it would be somewhere really weird like we once played in someone’s backyard, by a fire so it was real intimate. Those kind of shows were just great. There was one where I rolled up a bunch of joints and put them in a Frisbee and just put them down and said “Here everyone can grabs these if they want.” They were reluctant at first but halfway through the show, all the joints were gone, the whole crowd was blazing, and it was really great. We ended up playing for an hour and a half. It was just really fun. Shit like that I’ll never forget.

REAX: Are you involved in the designing of the album covers?
JD: Sometimes. I did draw a lot for a few years, but I kind of stopped doing it because the band got so busy. More than anything lately we’ve been about showcasing our friends’ work. Like William Keihn, who did Master’s Bedroom and Help. Paul Wackers, who did the Dog Poison cover. Heidi Alexander did the new Quadrospazzed, with the red dragon thing. If I see something I really dig I’m like “Fuck, this is perfect.” I’m glad I can help out my friends who are painters. It’s a funny thing because Paul Wackers, he’s the kind of dude that’s super mellow, really coolly guy, love his fucking work. Sells painting for an ass load of money but for free he’ll let me use his artwork. It’s totally flattering both ways for us to work together.

REAX: So for Help, you weren’t like I want a bat with a big ass rainbow behind it?
JD: Actually originally I told William I wanted a rainbow on it. He texted me one night at two in the morning saying that he had a dream and there was going to be a purple bat, and I was like “I don’t know, but with rainbow.” And he brought it over when he finished it and we had him change it just a little bit but he pretty much nailed it right on the head. I gave him a real rough idea with what to do with it and he just took it and ran with it. That cover is better than the record as far as I’m concerned. I saw it while he was painting it and went “Wow, whatever this is, I would want to buy it. It could be the shittiest record, but the record cover alone, I have to have this.”