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I really cannot imagine what your shows are like. Well, what are they like?(I didnÝt have the opportunity to see you last fall..maybe next time) What kind of audience do you attract?

People have told us on more than one occasion that our live show is incredible. I don't know if I'd label our live shows incredible, only because we're doing what should be the norm for a band playing rock and roll. We enjoy what we're doing and try to communicate that excitement to the audience and with luck the audience reciprocates and together we all have a blast. It's still really hard for me to understand or relate to the great number of bands that would rather be on stage to stare at their feet, rather than try and perform. The whole game of "I'm on stage, but I really don't want to be, aren't I a tortured soul," is just so much crap to me.
In regards to where the energy comes from, I think the energy is always there, because you're doing something you love, and you drive all day and put up with all the other frustrations that come up, just so that you can have a ball on stage for 45 minutes to 1 hour. With most shows we play, at first there'll be some folks up front who are real into it from the get go, and as the show goes on the rest of the folks will loosen up a bit. There was a club once in Athens GA called the Exirlence (sic) that was really a cool and bizarre club to play. It was pretty small but had a lot of a certain kind of class. They had red crushed velvet carpeting on three of the walls and the fourth was one enormous mirror. Plenty of disco balls and lights, plus the owner had all sorts of stuffed animals stuck off in corners, on top of things, and hanging from the ceiling. I'm not talking about fuzzy toy animals, but taxidermy stuff like a bear, foxes, lots of owls, crows, squirrels even. It was a black club, but during the week, "I like to get you kind of college bands in here, cause black folks don't go out like white folks during the week," that was according to Tony the black owner of the club. Mainly he made ends meet by having a ladies night once a month with male strippers. Guys wouldn't be allowed inside until midnight, when the strip show ended.
Tony said, "See, while the ladies be gettin' horny and all worked up, I get like 200-300 guys out here in the parking lot lining up to get in, cause they know some of those (ladies) be ready then to get it on." Back then in Athens last call was at 1am, so the dudes had to work fast that last hour. The show we did there that is the most memorable to me is when we had a sort of parade into the club. We had the horn section back then too, plus an extra guy beating on a floor tom, cause we started the set off, and the procession into the club, with "Drums a Go-Go".
There were two guys that were going to carry me into the club on their shoulders and before we went in, I told Tony to please turn off the two Ceiling fans, because they were so low. He said no problem. There was a problem. He turned one off, but not the other. So as these guys carried me in towards the stage, they had me aimed right at the fan. We went past the first one no problem, because it was off, but when I realized the second one wasn't, I tried to bend down. As I was trying to lower myself, the guys carrying me thought I was falling down, so they kept trying to hoist me higher. All the while the music's playing, so they can't understand me screaming that the fan is still going. Finally as we're right up on the fan, I'm laying flat as I can and these guys pass me right under it. I think I managed to clip a couple of nose hairs that way. As for what kind of audience we attract, it really varies. When we're playing in more "punk rock" towns like Pensacola FL, for example, we'll have a lot of punk rock kids there and they'll tell us how we sound like the early Dead Kennedys. I'd say since we have to play bars mostly that automatically puts our average audience age higher. If someone is familiar with the kind of stuff we do or incorporate, they're probably in their late 20s-early 30s. That's sad to me only in the sense that we're playing teenage music for people way beyond their teens, but that's not completely the case, because this is timeless music. Anyone, regardless of age, who hears what we do, and has an ounce of fun left in their body will react positively to what we do. How do I know that? I know that because we do on occasion play in front of audiences that have a wide age range. We play weddings.

You accuse that most bands were (still are) gazing at their shoes during live performances. I agree, but what about bands that play rather sophisticated music (ok, thatÝs basically not rÝnÝr)? It seems to be more difficult jumping and running on stage when you are playing some complicated chords. Besides, the ramones did never move a lot on stage, what about them?

Obviously I'm not saying that I'd go to see a symphony perform and expect the cellists to be riding their instruments. The musics that I love the most, and which the band tries to incorporate, are things to which the inspiration is as important as the execution. You are dealing with excitement and that excitement needs to be illustrated. There just needs to be a visual connection and an aspect to creating a show to make the whole experience worthwhile. I don't mean that the band has to be jumping all the time or doing acrobatics, but they do need to communicate with the audience. They need to involve the audience. They need to make a show. My favorite bands accomplish this. Current bands like the Hatebombs, the Fleshtones, Southern Culture on the Skids all write great fun songs and when they're on stage, perform like it matters. Part of what defines a shoe gazer to me, is the aspect of those bands where these individuals are trying to project some sort of twisted/tortured genius that is just so much crap. It becomes an excuse to ignore the audience and hold them in contempt and deliver that contempt under the auspices of art. Well my friend, that kind of art rhymes with fart and both are way to stinky for me. I've never seen the Ramones in concert, but what the Ramones did do was communicate a overwhelming sense of fun to their audiences, both in their songs and demeanor. They definitely were playing to their audience and at their shows interacted with their audiences.

You have written somewhere that you are playing about 110 shows a year without making much money per show. How can you afford touring? How can you combine your vast touring with your actual jobs? Or in other words: What jobs do you have?

Trying to budget ourselves on the road we probably make about $100 a week over expenses. When we finish a tour we have enough money in our pockets to cover rent and possibly one or two other bills. Compared to many other bands I know that try to tour, we're fairly successful to bring any money home. Most bands take money with them and bring less home. How do we afford to tour? It's pretty hard. We all have pretty shitty low end jobs with understanding bosses that allow us to take time off. Dan Electro works for his family's fish farm. Buzz is a part time waiter and he and his wife have a screen priniting business. They mostly make T-shirts. Montague is at various times trying to finish university, so he has taken out many student loans. He lives off these and various financial aids. (Sometimes I wonder how he will pay all that money back) I work at a local small record store. The store has new records and CDs, but as all such shops, it stays in business by selling used CDs. When we're not on tour I work there 35-45 hours a week. I also write up movie descriptions for a cable TV network. It is free lance writing, so It's not a weekly thing. As I've said elsewhere in the interview, you really have to love what you're doing or you shouldn't be doing this.

When you mentioned Buzz, I thought of something else: On the "Get Tough" LP, you do a song "Mule Lipped", was that recorded live? I am asking because youÝre kind of machinegunning something barely understandable (itÝs so fast) before the song which is something unusual (for your records, as far as i know). Because of that, I wonder what you think about live-recording. Normally it should suit your kind of music, shouldnÝt it? Have you done that?

At the begining of "Mule lipped" I say,"What do you call that there, Buzz?" It is meant as a question to Buzz Hagstrom.

Later I realized that to anyone not knowing Buzz Hagstrom's name, it probably sounded like "What do you call that there buzz?" In that sense, "buzz" could refer to the excitement caused by the new "Mule lipped" dance craze. The song is normally sung by me, with Montague answering the "Mule lipped" parts. But, when we recorded it, Montague had left the band due to his diabetes. So for about a year Buzz sang the "Mule lipped" parts and that's when we recorded it. The song was recorded "live" in the studio, like all our songs. We do at various times try to record our live shows and are successful to varying degrees. At some point we'll try to do a live album for sure. They can be very hard to pull off though. Without the benifit of having the band hopping around in front of you, it's hard to convey all the energy that is being released when you just here the four instruments. We have been bootlegged. A woman in Milwaukee bootlegged a show of ours that we did there and sells it to stores. The stores in turn retail the CD for $28. When we were there last, a store helped us track down the woman and we insisted that she give us copies of the CD. She had never told us that she had recorded the show and that she was selling the show. She is a woman who makes a living off of selling bootlegs. She even bootlegs other bootlegs. There is no honor among theives. Of course she doedn't make a living off the Woggles, but she lives off selling U2, Cure, and Stevie Ray Vaughn bootlegs. For the most part the quality is ok. Like a regular Woggles show, the guitar volume is so loud that it's hard to hear the bass or the vocals. If the club has a good PA that can be corrected, but often that is not the case. But the overall performances are pretty exciting. I'm not happy with my harmonica playing, because a couple of the reeds weren't working. The Hohner failed me. How do we feel about being bootlegged? In some ways it's flattering. If we thought she was really selling a lot, then we'd insist on her paying us something or giving us copies to sell, something like that. Till then, we won't worry about it.

Sometimes, there seems to be an unwritten law that garage and 60's bands have to record in a very unprofessional way, I mean lo-fi. Where do you think does that come from and what is your opinion as a band about that?

Since many of the folks who listen to garage rock and roll came to it through the Pebbles, Boulder, and other bootleg comps, I believe that they think that the recording quality is supposed to be muddy and hard to hear. When in fact, those comps were made very shitty and the sound quality on the original 45s are much better than the comps. In some instances bands like the Chesterfield Kings (at least early on) were trying to capture the sound of a 60s studio, and they were in a large part successful on early records. But to people who think it has to sound shitty to be authentic that's just crap. I love the way the early Kinks records sound and those two Them albums with Van Morrison sound fantastic to me. Those sounds in turn set thousands of teenage bands into garages trying to work up songs that emulated their heroes, and helped them get the girls. I think for some current bands, maybe there is a thought of rebelling against what they perceive as a clean sound from modern recordings and the staleness that implies. For myself the point is to hear the music. I think that when someone is too worried about making it sound "lo-fi" enough they are no better than someone who wants it to sound too "clean". In both instances the music or song becomes secondary to the recording and that is what I don't like. I think the first Mummies 7"s sound terrific. There is definitely a lo-fi quality to it, but you can still hear everything that's going on and there is a great presense to the music. Later on their recordings just sound shitty and it's just not worth the effort of trying to listen through that to find the song. I don't think in terms of Toe Rag being a lofi studio. To me it's a studio that gives a distinctive feel to many of the bands that record there and that's cool to me, because it never detracts from the performance of the players and in some instances enhances it. For example, on the Kaisers "Beat It Up" album there is a ton of compression (for the sake of argument I'll quickly define compression as a studio effect that pulls up the sounds of various instruments during a "hole" or "break" in the song that helps to bring out a cooler character to the respective instrument). Overall that characteristic really helps the drum sound and makes it really powerful. In the same sense I don't think of the studio where the Sonics originally recorded as lo-fi. I'd argue that the engineer at the time was proud of his studio and wanted it to sound as good as possible, and so it does with a unique quality that doesn't distract from the monster songs that the Sonics were recording. The fact that Crypt had started the whole Teenage Shutdown series to me is a reaction to the fact that the aforementioned comps/bootlegs did a horrible job presenting that music, and great pains are taken by Crypt to make sure that the Teenage Shutdown series sounds as good as possible.

Have you ever done an interview which was as long (both real length and time, we started it in august, right?) as this one?

In length I have done interviews that were this long, but not time wise.

OK, that is it for now, I canÝt imagine anything which would be worth asking, can you?

No.

Thanks for your time and see you on your next tour!

The Woggles Homepage!

Discography (only albums)

1993 "Teendanceparty" LP (Estrus Rec.)
1994 "The Zontar Sessions" LP (Estrus Rec.)
1997 "Get Tough" LP (Telstar Rec.)
1998 "Wailing With The Woggles" 10" (One Louder Rec.)
2000 "Fractured" LP (Telstar)