photo by Jason Falchook
JAMES CAHILL
It goes back pretty far. One of my earliest memories is laying on my bedroom floor and drawing to stacks of records, like Marlo Thomas' feminist kiddie record Free to Be You and Me, the Pete’s Dragon and Grease soundtracks, Rick Dee’s Disco Duck and lots of musical theater from our public library. I spent much of elementary school listening to musicals from the 1930s to 60s by Rogers and Hart, Rogers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter, but I also really loved Michael Jackson (who Chris, aka Pontiac, and I got to see live on the Victory Tour when we were super young), The Carpenters (the favorite of our baby sitter), and whomever was a guest star on The Muppets. Many of my ideas about pop music and bands came from TV. I was absolutely in love with the Batman theme song, which had everything: trebly guitar, horns, women signing nonsense phrases, and a really campy sensibility... The Monkees used to air early in the mornings in NY and I remember getting up before anybody else was awake to watch it alone. I also loved the Hanna-Barbara and Rankin/Bass programs, like The Banana Splits, Josie and the Pussycats and The Jackson 5ive cartoon. So my blueprint for being in a band, writing songs, and solving small-time crimes all derived from these sources.
At what age did you begin to explore and find new music? How did your early musical tastes develop, and who/what were the biggest influences on those choices?
I started getting into contemporary pop and rock in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. I got a clock radio with a cassette player for my birthday and three tapes: The Monkees “Then and Now: The Best of the Monkees,” U2’s “War,” and Run DMC’s “Raising Hell.” I had four older siblings, so I inherited and borrowed a lot from them, which is how I got exposed to The Clash, The Kinks, The Who, David Bowie, The B-52s, The Cure, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, The Primitives, and Jesus and Mary Chain. My sisters all listened to WLIR, which was a new wave station in the NY area, so I tuned my clock radio to that station and got introduced to The Ramones, The Replacements, The Soup Dragons, Teenage Fanclub, and even Sweet Baby (I believe I may have been lucky to be listening to the radio the one time they were played on it in NY in 1989, and spent years searching for that record). I used to skip lunch a couple of times a week at school so I could save up money for tapes and lps.
My neighbors the Martinez brothers knew all kinds of cool punk bands championed by Thrasher Magazine that were good for skating to—Black Flag, The Dead Kennedy’s, Minor Threat, Suicidal Tendencies, the Butthole Surfers—so that was a formidable influence too. Around 8th grade my friends Krister, Chris, and I started going to Manhattan to skate and check out records stores just to flip through the bins, and that’s how I discovered the X-Ray Spex, the Buzzcocks, The Dickies, Redd Kross, and other pop forward punk acts. The summer between 8th and 9th grade my friend Tim and I pooled our money to buy train tickets into the city to go to an autograph signing by The Ramones at Tower Records in the Village. We didn’t have money to buy any of their swag (or even get two tickets home) but it felt very important to make that pilgrimage and meet our heroes.
Another huge discovery was coming across WFMU, and their free form format. When I was in highschool Pat Duncan used to broadcast his punk show on Thursday afternoons including live sets by touring acts, and that’s how I first heard The Mr. T Experience, who really blew my mind with their mix of catchy songcraft and irreverent, pop-culture references.
One final source was my mom who had a knack for finding cool things in the trash, and following that ethos, I could never pass a trash pile on my skateboard without investigating. I came across a lot of great records that way as well as lots of weird stuff: Beatles and Herman’s Hermits albums, Lesley Gore records, a box set of rock musicals (Tommy, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar), but also speeches by Kennedy, Borscht-belt comedy albums, and what not. I also spent a good amount of time in Salvation Army record bins picking things based upon their covers.
This all added up to a pretty heterogeneous musical education, which hasn’t really stopped.
When did do you begin playing music, and what were the circumstances? Was the guitar first? How did you learn to play, and to what extent is your musical background formal? How much of what you've learned has been self-taught?
I was pretty fortunate to always have access to musical instruments. My school district had a great band program, so I started studying trumpet and piano in 4thgrade, euphonium and tuba in junior high. The guitar came last and without any formal instruction. In 11th grade I bought a black Charvel heavy metal guitar and a yellow Gorilla practice guitar amp for $90 from a classmate who was upgrading his gear. I went to the local music shop and picked up a guitar chord book as well as the few books of sheet music that were closest to my tastes: The Monkees greatest hits, The Cars greatest hits, Bob Marley’s greatest hits, as well as a Queen’s greatest hits and Hair the Musical chord book, which were both at the upper level of what I could play then. A few friends taught me some tricks and with that I was off and running.
At what point did you begin taking a creative approach to music, and do you recall writing your first song? Were there specific influences guiding your first attempts? Were there any people in your life encouraging you or offering feedback that helped to build your confidence?
I didn’t really start writing in a regular way until I was 17 or 18 or so. I mostly wrote on an acoustic guitar. My first slew of songs were pretty silly, and all a little too long, but they got me rolling and I started doing open mics, and not getting booed, and that was a lot of encouragement. The first song I wrote on electric guitar, with the idea of starting a band that actually did something, was “Arizona” which appears on our first ep. The people I’ve played with over the years have been great interlocutors, critics, and sounding boards. Chris Mazer and Mike Faloon were really important in terms of pushing the songs, suggesting ideas, and being patient with me as I worked through ideas, and the many labels we’re worked with have been really helpful. To some degree, the bands we played with, like the wonderful Egghead., Dirt Bike Annie, and Boris the Sprinkler, who all helped push me to write better and get more ambitious, though in a quite different ways.
Were you a part of any significant bands or projects prior to Kung Fu Monkeys? Which style of music were you most interested in playing when you first started writing songs? How did your songwriting goals evolve into the style you're most known for?
Significant to me? Sure. In high school I started a group called the Screaming Nannies, and we played a high school battle of the bands where we were objectively the worst band on the gymnasium floor (the group had various line-ups depending on the level of embarrassment my friends could tolerate, but the essential one included me on guitar and vocals, my non-drumming friend Mike on drums, and another friend, Jessica Pavone, on violin—who also played on KFM’s Strange Mystery sessions some two decades later but is best known as an avant-garde composer and performer). I would best describe The Nannies as Shaggs-esque, but I was trying to write songs with hooks, I just didn’t have the ability yet. I then spent a couple of years playing alone as I mentioned, and that’s when I really started figuring out what kind of songwriter I was and wanted to be. I mostly played acoustic shows at coffee shops around LA, and really, anywhere where people would have me. Most of those songs were pretty much heart-on-my-sleeve cries of a lonely and awkward 18 year old, and not very good ones at that, but they helped me get most of that out of my system and start to develop a voice of my own, which certainly helped when I started working with other musicians again on what became first Dr. Pasketti and his Kung Fu Monkeys and eventually simply the Kung Fu Monkeys (a name I outgrew by the time we had finished our first ep, but ended up stuck with for various reasons).
When I was really active in music, as a way of practicing, I used to play along to albums I loved by Cub, The Kinks, Undertones, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (esp. Rock’ and Romance and It’s Time For…), Buddy Holly, Lesley Gore, The Beach Boys, but also all the Phil Spector produced girl groups like the Ronettes, and would try to figure out all the songs on a side (a really good exercise for learning how to write and play, and for getting inspired). This helped me internalize the key structures of those idioms, and also taught me a few good tricks, like the effect of throwing in the occasional weird jazz chord, or simply a made-up chord like at the end of “Luau All Night” (which was primarily written by Chris, but I added a few flourishes here and there). I suppose the more I wrote, the stronger my voice and style became, and the more I had a sense of how to get what I wanted.
I think my songwriting goals never really stopped evolving, as the better I got at it (if anybody believes I improved) the more demanding I became on myself. One clear trajectory in my songwriting was a move away from an exclusively first-person perspective (the stars in his/her eyes narrator of most of our tracks) to a focus on scenes and character studies and more oblique, surrealist-inspired imagery. When I write a song, I’m usually already imagining the production. Had we ever gotten lucky enough to have had a serious budget behind us, we would have gone nuts in the studio: lots of strings, horns, and what not, but given we typically had time for only a day or a day and a half for most of our eps, and something like five days for the majority of our album, we had to work fast and compromise a bit on what we could get done. But any time I have entered a studio to record, I’ve brought alone a notebook with a pretty clear flight plan of the ways we would use every track available to us. That’s not to say that my collaborators haven’t been important to this process: quite the opposite. Working with all the bandmates and engineers (particularly Chris “Pontiac” Mazer, Mike Faloon, but also the later line-ups of KFM) made significant contributions, and also allowed me to think about how to write for and with the collective.
In your work there's an apparent authenticity in your craft that makes the songs much less "pop punk" and much more timeless, though clearly rooted in a classic rock n' roll era that predates our generation. What motivated this mission to create such a distinctly classic sound?
Thanks for describing it that way, that’s super generous. I don’t know that I was on a mission so much as simply writing the sorts of songs I wanted or needed to write and trying to capture the sounds I was after in a way that was a little less obviously time-stamped. I like a lot of catchy punk music, but in terms of what and how I write and the limitations of my performance style on guitar and as a singer, we just weren’t ever going to go for the Marshall-stack, Ramones-clones sound that many of our contemporaries were pursuing.
Your craft is very impressive in its simplicity and directness, but your melodies and structures are also sophisticated in the context of pop punk. Was there a conscious effort to balance complex melodies and arrangements with a more stripped down, straight-forward approach?
Context is everything, right? A lot of the realization of our songs was a matter of the limitations of skill and the need to economize. The Kung Fu Monkeys were all amateurs: people doing music for the love of it, but without real professional ambitions, and, at least on my part, that much technical skill. I took a lot of inspiration from early Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Jonathan Richman records, which were often stripped down to the basics. I do suppose that on two eps—"Rock n’ Roll Dance Party with the Kung Fu Monkeys, Shindig Vol. 2” and “Electric Tangerine Smile, Shindig Vol. 3”—I was interested in seeing how far we could strip things down to essentials, and perhaps went a little overboard. We may have gone a bit too far for some tastes with that on “Electric Tangerine Smile,” but it’s worth noting that record was made in my apartment for the cost of a cassette tape and a pizza pie, which fed the musicians and then served as the drum that Mikey Erg played on the record. (That incidentally is a testament to Mike’s skills that he made a cardboard box sound so good but also the magic of hanging a single SM57 from the ceiling and recording the room, which is how we tracked the instruments for that record: all live in single takes, with the vocals being recorded afterwards in the same fashion.)
You're known to have championed not only the "Bug" guitar tone, but also a very distinct doubled vocal style. The production is clear and yet there's a roughness to it that feels very organic. Can you describe your process for finding the KFM "sound", and explain why those particular aesthetics resonated so much with you?
You’ve nicely described the arc of the group’s sound. I always had a pretty strong sense of what I wanted to do in the studio, but as I mentioned we rarely had the time, budget, or vocabulary to get all the way there. A lot of the sound was a result of trial and error but also learning how to effectively communicate to others what was going on in my head, but also asking lots of questions of other musicians and studio people, and studying any photos of bands I loved at work to see what they were playing and recording with, where the mics were set-up, etc. (I wish I had come across Gabriel Roth’s manifesto “Shitty is Pretty” when I first starting recording as it would have sped up things immensely.) It might be interesting to ask former members what it was like to work with me, as I think I was a bit of a control freak.
In terms of doubled-vocals, this was something so many of the pop singers of the 60s did (and The Ramones too), and it sounds so much richer to me. Our first few eps were made with less than ideal amplifiers (it wasn’t always easy to afford studios with more than Marshall stacks at first), but as I got a clearer understanding of the sound I wanted, and was able to convince other people it truly was what I wanted (a few engineers were incredulous that I didn’t want distortion on my guitars), things got a bit easier. I played through two fantastic early 60s amps—an Ampeg Reverberocket and a Silvertone 1472 (which were both unpopular and inexpensive when I got them: one cost about $250 and the other I got in a gear trade with Chris), and my beloved and now departed Kalamazoo KG-2A guitar, which was a pretty “plinky” sounding guitar (I found it in the window of Rivington Guitars, if memory serves me correctly, with a sign that said, for some reason, “Perfect for girls”), and a Danelectro 12-string, which I also sadly don’t have anymore, but for a relatively cheap guitar, sounded great. Part of these decisions were purely practical: I didn’t want to lug around heavy equipment and didn’t care for things to be all that overwhelmingly loud (these were 12 and 10 watt amps), but I also couldn’t afford a Vox AC-15 and a Rickenbacker at the time and the gear I used was more or less the same materials so many great teenage garage groups of the 60s used. I should say that Chris was a great source of information about gear and recording lore. He worked for a while as a professional sound engineer (a really good one) and he picked up a lot of great insight. Mike Faloon had a huge musical vocabulary, and as editor of the zine Go Metric, was really plugged in with what was happening in underground music and would share all kinds of great records with me that gave me lots of ideas. He was a pretty important influence on really pushing my tastes.
In terms of the aesthetic resonance, it was in 60s pop that I first came across a mixture of profound yearning and idealism, born of disappointment and a will to escape, that suffused not only the lyrics but the entire production. It offered a kind of salve for me during a tough period in my life. At the same time, I loved the spazzy, hyperactive energy of punk, and tried to merge those two (like many others before me obviously).
As Timbo from Mutant Pop emphasized in his description of your vocals, there's really no other pop punk singer quite like you. In the context of mid/late 90's pop punk and punk rock, did you feel that you were taking a bold step? Is there a sense in which the extremely upbeat vibes and sincerely sweet vocals were more "ballsy" than the typical snotty sneer most punk bands were going for? How did you see yourself and KFM in relation to the more popular musical aesthetics of the Lookout!, Fat, and Epitaph eras?
That community—or at least a small but crucial part of it—embraced us, so in a way I feel a strong fondness for many of the people from that moment in underground music. We of course encountered plenty of bands, audience members, and critics who weren’t having it, and were even openly hostile toward us. I won’t name names, but we had label mates we played with on tour who clearly saw us as an affront to their understanding punk rock, which maybe was true, but we weren’t necessarily following any ethos besides be kind to everybody and accessible to fans and fellow bands. When we played shows, the punker the crowd, the poppier and more gently we’d play. If we were on a full punk bill at a bar, I’d often give the group juice boxes to bring out on stage, or pretend I was listening to Lesley Gore songs on transistor radio, or whatever else would be slightly askew. Somebody in the magazine Punk Planet, I believe, once started a review of “Girls, Cars, Sun, Fun!” by calling us one of the most subversive bands in the underground, for precisely this reason, which was validating given that Punk Planet hated our first few records.
In terms of my vocal style, I do think years listening to musicals and Irish music gave me a healthy appreciation for the value of a high tenor. When we were very active and I was keeping my voice in shape, I had a pretty wide vocal range (I did all the falsetto parts as well as bass vocals on our records). The thing with a tenor voice is it’s pretty hard to sound tough, so that may have played a part in shaping the sweetness of the sound.
In terms of how we saw ourselves in relation to that scene, we often were on the margins. We were a bit too exuberant for the indie pop scenesters of that moment but a bit too twee and poppy for many of the punkers. Perhaps we never found our niche, but we did meet lots of great people.
The Kung Fu Monkeys catalog is very consistent in terms of the songwriting quality, the production aesthetics, and the overall image enhanced by the cover art and photos of the band that might have easily tricked the listener into believing that your songs were written and recorded in the 1960s. Do you feel that you fulfilled your true vision of the band? Are you satisfied with how it all wrapped up? Were there any other goals for KFM that remain unrealized?
That’s really kind of you to say. Too kind perhaps, but thanks. There was a time where I couldn’t bear to listen to some of the recordings but I’ve gotten over that, and now am mostly proud of it, warts and all. There are a few lyrics I wish I had written differently—for instance, in “I Miss The Ramones” I wish I had stuck with my original lyrics of “if they were here I’d kiss them”—and compromises I wish I hadn’t made in the studio (especially with the guitar sounds on “School’s Out, Surf’s Up, Let’s Fall in Love”), but now it all seems very much a part of the moment and history of intimate struggle that goes into bringing any creative object into the world. There are a few things I still wish we had gotten to in the studio that are now sadly lost to history. During the sessions for “It’s Coast to Coast” we tracked all the parts save vocals for a song I wrote called “Do You Do You Do You Do You Do You Do You Do You Do You Dig the Shaggs?” which for issues of time we never got to do the vocals for (we were using a studio on off hours and got kicked out). I have since lost the chord charts and lyrics, so we’ll sadly never complete that, though it was a hilarious (to my mind) song and featured a great violin part and a Shaggs-esque breakdown. Likewise, on our “Mysterious Mystery” sessions I really wanted to play a typewriter solo on “Persephone Please” (I still hear it in my head when I hear that song) and had a much more ambitious drum sound for “Alice, After the Fall” that we didn’t get to experiment with, again for time reasons. In terms of unrealized goals, I always wanted to bring the group more into contact with the African American roots of the music we played and had some fantasies of attempting a soul record with vibraphones and the like: I love the Motown and Stax records sounds. But I think we finished our most active period on a real high note: I’m very proud of all the aspects of “The Incredibly Strange Case of the Mysterious Mystery” and “Son of…” which were made when we were the house-band for the original Chris Gethard show at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade. We were so well-practiced and at the height of our powers. But who knows, maybe there’s another chapter still to be written: all of us are more or less still in touch and good friends, even if we’re spread throughout North America. It’s always a treat to get to hang out with the gang when were in the same city.
Getting back to the lyrical tone - there seemed to be an intentional attempt to create a very sunny, bubblegum atmosphere throughout each album. The lyrics addressed love and life in ways that always came across to me as playful and fun yet sincere. In composing lyrics, was there a serious focus on maintaining this vibe, or was the process more care-free as the songs suggest?
I was really inspired by Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building writers, and they put a lot of care into crafting things that could be simultaneously serious, silly, but always sincere and even honestly sentimental, but never self-serious. In other words, genuine, never condescending, but also sort of silly and in on the joke. I had a dream that eventually we’d get picked up to do a cartoon, so the songs had to be kid friendly. I often wrote from the perspective of a character—a slightly more optimistic and perhaps innocent version of myself, but not quite me—and this sometimes was a little limited (I certainly could have railed about injustices or expressed a bit more Id). I think we did have a lot of expectations to meet in terms of what the labels wanted as well as our fans. I often dreamed of starting an evil twin band that would be sunnily morose, but that never came together, save for a few home sessions under the moniker The Peppermint Engine.
Part of my desire at the time to stay on the sunny side of the street was because there was a good amount of sadness in my late adolescent years: a number of close friends died in a short period of time (from suicide, drugs, strange accidents) and my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. In the midst of all of this, my mom took me to see Don Was’s Brian Wilson documentary, I just wasn’t meant for these times. This didn’t connect with me at the time, but I think the gift that my mom gave me on that afternoon, besides time together with her, was a model for how to find solace and even shelter from emotional pain in the tiny utopia of a pop song, which is sort of what I tried to do with the band.
Did you find that KFM provided for you a fulfilling emotional outlet? I've wondered if you might also have a songwriting mode for darker, more negative emotions that wouldn't have fit the tone that people associate with your work. Are you generally as happy as your songs suggest, or is this outlet something that helped to elevate your mood by creating very fun and care-free tunes?
The band was a good way of sublimating sadness or anger, so I do think part of it was trying to elevate my mood. I did limit myself a bit in the voice I privileged in my work with KFM. I definitely kept much of the idout of my songwriting with the group. This was perhaps a misstep given how important id and recklessness are to so much great rock music that I love, from the inchoate teenage lust of garage rock, the sizzle of great soul, the unrestrained howls of The Stooges, and the genius of Ronnie Spector’s delivery. It only lurks at the very margins of KFM material, and mostly in a rather joking form, like “Somebody Put Something in My Ovaltine,” which plays on Dee Dee Ramone’s “Somebody Put Something in My Drink” but also so many great psychedelic songs, or a few winks in “My Baby Said Yeah!”
What did you make of the response and feedback you've received over the years for your songs? Did you feel that enough people "got it"? To me your songwriting has universal appeal and yet there's a very underground element to it that seems to all but guarantee that only those who seek it out will find it. Do you agree?
This is a tricky question: the fact that we’re talking today really blows me away, as it’s been quite some time since KFM has done anything. Honestly, I do wish more people had found the band, and I suppose that’s our fault for not pushing ourselves more or being more careerist (in fact we overdid our commitment to obscurity by primarily releasing our work on tiny 7” record labels), but it was also a matter of falling in between genres, not playing cool, and simply having some bad timing (our CD School’s Out was released just as Timbo started to shut down Mutant Pop and file sharing was becoming a thing, so that killed it, and we never got to tour that album as Faloon and I left NY and the band went on the first prolonged hiatus). All the same, a few bands have covered our songs, including a really great version of “When the Waves are Low” by Saint-Brooklynsburg, a musician based in Russia.
Reflecting on your work, what has been your proudest moment as a songwriter? Are you still musically active, and if so what projects/endeavors are you currently involved in? What are your future musical goals, and what "bucket list" items would you ideally want to check off as a musician and songwriter? Finally, what advice or perspective might you offer to aspiring songwriters?
I think we ended on a high note with our last eps, in terms of the quality of the songwriting and performances. Watching the last Chris Gethard Showand hearing the studio audience humming along to “Persephone Please” during the closing credits was quite a high point, even if almost nobody knows that’s one of my songs. The songs I wrote for my spouse—“Double Bubble,” “Let’s Go,” “I’m Combing My Hair”—are close to my heart. I have a soft spot for the songs I wrote about music—“I Miss the Ramones,” “I, Herman,” “Junior Varsity is Wrecking My Brain”—and the sheer silliness of “American Beach Party USA” and “Chapel Hill, Surf City” still bring a smile to my face. Looking back at 60 plus songs we recorded, I’m on the whole pretty pleased with the silly little songs I managed to bring into the world, and certainly had fun going around the country playing music and making records.
As for future goals, honestly, I took a long pause from music. I sold most of my gear and my record collection to help a family member in need, and I have a pretty demanding day job that keeps me busy and demands most of my creative energies. However, recently I picked up a guitar amp, a fuzz pedal, and took in my one remaining guitar (a gift from Chris) for repairs, with the sense that maybe I’d try to do some writing again, which actually means relearning to play and sing. I still have a few unfinished songs rattling around. I’ve also thought about doing a French Revolution inspired punk record called “In Defence of the Terror” (the name of a book by a great French historian Sophie Wahnich) which would mostly be songs about the guillotine and barricades, which are timely topics.
I don’t think I have any earth-shattering advice for aspiring songwriters, but I do believe, as with any form of writing or creation, it’s a matter of discipline and good habits. Don’t let a day go by that you don’t commit a note or lyric to the page! I used to do a lot of writing on public transportation and even wrote the chords and lyrics for most of “The Kung Fu Monkeys are America’s Favorite Band” on the 6 train after work one day, so always have a notebook and pen handy. Study the masters, whomever they may be for your personal cannon. It’s always a good idea to listen to lots of music beyond whatever genre or style you might work in. Ultimately, though, write for yourself.
The Kung Fu Monkeys remain America's Favorite Band. Great interview!
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