By David Edward Clark
Jeff and Porkchop of Excepter at the 'Sco. Photo by David Roswell.
After their show on Wednesday, I sat down with Excepter over a case of PBR and asked for some stories. Our conversation flowed from their music to their favorite shows to a tour story concerning a strip club in Albuquerque.
I quickly gathered that Excepter’s music is exactly what they want it to be. “I just feel like I want to do something really true. When I realized I would never be successful as an artist, I stopped caring about what the audience response would be,” said Clare.
Nathan described the band as “a rebellion, in the sense that I’m repelled by a lot of what I see bands do. What I like about Excepter is that we just get some kind of viscerality and in the moment, and in truth, that’s better.”
Porkchop summed up what he gains through listening to and making music. “There’s so much music that’s based in reality, but when I go out and I want to hear some music…I want to loose it, I want to lose my mind. I want to go to that place where I can be me.”
During the performance, a projection of miscellaneously organized images played behind the band. John Jon described his role as the video artist and the way he creates his art. “In the moment, it’s usually that I have a knob and I turn it until something good comes up. Then I turn another knob until it looks the way I want it to. It’s kind of like channel surfing. Sometimes I’m more deliberate.” Jeff added, “Channel surfing is really a propos to what we’re doing. It’s the same thing for the music.”
Jeff turned the interview around and asked about our reactions to Michael Jackson’s death. The rest of the night would be dedicated to stories. Porkchop offered his own anecdote of the night the legend died. “I DJed a party the night that M died. I knew that I was DJing this party before I knew that he had died. Then I got the word, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going home to get my records’ like 15 minutes after I knew that he had died. I grabbed as much Jackson shit as I could find while I was getting my records together. I played maybe six or seven Michael Jackson songs in a row, and people were still like ’PLAY MICHAEL JACKSON! PLAY MICHAEL JACKSON!’ and I’m like, ‘I’m playing fucking Michael Jackson. Like, listen to it!’”
Later in the interview, talk once again returned to Michael Jackson. “My claim to fame,” started Jeff, “is that I actually saw Michael Jackson in the flesh at Virgin Megastore…I was walking around, and as usual, I was just looking at people’s feet, and I saw these diamond encrusted slippers and I was like ‘Whaaat?’ My eyes went up to the stirrup pants and the fucking extra large FUBU jacket and the fucking bandana across the face and the giant, huge, wide-brimmed hat. I was like, ‘There’s only one person in the world with this sense of style—and that’s Michael fucking Jackson.’”
The band all agreed on their best tour story, which Dan started off. “We were in Albuquerque. We were supposed to play a show that night, but it got canceled. We were about two and a half weeks deep in a tour, and some of the other dudes were feeling really randy and they wanted to go to a strip club really bad. Nathan Corban–he should be given some credit–was very against the idea. In fact, he said that he was philosophically opposed to going to the strip club. I said I would be the nice guy and go play pool with Nathan across the street from this place called Knockouts, where the rest of our band and our roadie at the time were encamped. Eventually, me and Nathan started talking about tour money, and then we thought, ‘are they blowing all of our tour money at this strip club?’”
Daniel at the 'Sco. Photo by David Roswell.
“Nathan got so mad that he decided to go to the strip club…I said, ‘That’s cool, ‘cause I wanted to go to the strip club anyway.’ So I was happy. Then we walked to the strip club and we realized that beers were like $2 and lap dances were $5. The most they could have spent was like $20 at this point. So then we walk in, and here’s where my story really starts. A stripper there asks me if I want a lap dance and I say [to the band], ‘I dunno, are we staying or are we leaving?’ Then you [Jeff] handed me a $10 bill and said, ‘Go for it. Go for it dude,’ which is big time. That’s like two lap dances in Albuquerque.”
“We had to wait in line to go to this room for the lap dance, and she said, ‘Hey, what’s your name?’ And I was like, ‘Dan.’ Then I asked what was her name, and she said, ‘Manhattan.’ I said, “That’s funny, ‘cause I live in Manhattan,’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, I did too, I went to NYU,’ and I said, ’Oh, I did too actually.’ So we go inside, and she’s giving me a lap dance. She turns around, like flaps her hair and asks, ‘What was your major?’ Like, while she’s giving me a lap dance, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ And she asks what I was doing in town, and I said I’m in a band and she’s like, ‘That’s cool,’ and I was like, “Right, we gotta get out of here.” We left, and that led to another funny story, which I’ll leave for everyone else. So I get home to New York after the tour, and I was telling my roommate the story about the stripper going to NYU, and he was like, ’Wait, what town were you in?’ and I was like, ‘Albuquerque,’ and he was like, ‘I know her!’ It’s the smallest world man.”
Jeff picked up the story after they left the strip club. “We were onward to our usual thing of driving until three in the morning…and we all had to pee so we stopped at a gas station that was closed. We’re just peeing behind the dumpster, and this cop shows up. You know, flips his lights on. Then Nathan has this fucking save the day fucking proclamation. He’s like, ‘Hey, don’t worry, man. We’re not a bunch of assholes.’ It became the ‘We’re not a bunch of assholes tour of 2006.’”
Porkchop imitated the cop, talking in a tight voice. “Well, ya’know, you’re not a bunch of assholes, but a family could be driving by. A little girl could be looking out the window. And what would she see? She’d see a bunch of you peeing in the ditch. What would she think about that?”
Nathan’s only response was, “It’s two in the morning, man.” Thankfully, they got off.
Photo by David Roswell.
I asked them what shows were their favorites to play. “I mean, that show in Tokyo with Jeff Mills,” said Nathan. Jeff jumped in, “Well, we played that 24 hour all nude set at ATP.” Porkchop then elaborated, “We haven’t played nude in some time. That used to be something. I mean, being naked actually used to count for something.” Nathan concluded that “our anti-gravity show for NASA was something.”
Talk then moved to stories from their favorite concerts. Dan started. “I saw Nine Inch Nails play Madison Square Garden in 2001, or 2000 maybe, for the Fragile…in the encore of this Garden show, Marilyn Manson came out, and they had been feuding up to that point—like, everyone thought they hated each other. So he came out, and to see Madison Square Garden explode like that, it was electric. I was pretty into that. I see a lot of Indie cool shows, but that to me was alien ‘cause it was so theatrical, and there was a whole huge Roman drama to the thing that I’d like to see more often if I could, but it’s hard to find.”
Jeff then told his own. “I saw this Crash Warship show…this band would literally set fire everywhere they went. They would spend the first half of the evening filling the area with moisture, and then they would start throwing firecrackers at people. These shows would just go on and on and on, and there would just be nude people on platters with their teeth filed down, drinking each other’s blood…strobe lights, acid, people painted gold. You couldn’t see the band at all–there was no band. It was just like this drum throb and this flicker…the cool thing about it was just that I was afraid for my life. I was like, ‘I am going to get AIDS.’”
Clare told two stories. “The first concert that I ever went to that was popular music was New Kids on the Block…I didn’t know who they were, but I had never been to a concert before. It was at an amusement park, and it was amazing. I felt hysterical. That was cool, but then later I saw The Boredoms when I was a teenager. It was the first time I saw a show that was really true…just the microphone in his [the lead's] mouth, ducked taped to his face, hanging from pipes. The pipes were ripping out of the ceiling and they were trying to rip him down, trying to get him out of the club. [There were] two girl drummers on two full sets, and everybody fucking dancing and totally moshing and going insane. The bouncers were helpless.” Jeff interrupted. “Why didn’t they just turn it off?” and John answered, “They were drumming man, you can’t turn off drumming.”
Porkchop’s was “The Purple Rain Prince Tour, Prince and The Revolution and Sheila E. I was like 11. Me and my mom and my sister went. When the bed came down on chains during “Darling Nikki,” it was real.” Jeff responded, “I remember just hearing about that on the playground. Like, you can’t go because Prince strips naked: not for kids!”
Nathan was the last to go. “Because my parents were hippies, they started taking me to concerts since I was one, and then they started to let me pick which shows I wanted to go to when I was like 5. The first show I got to pick, which was in ’82, was Howard Jones…It was so amazing. It started off with this fog machine, and the fog cleared…there were two foam soldiers, bright green and bright orange, in these full foam tubular outfits, medieval-style foam. They were having this battle with these crazy foam swords. Then one guy won…and this guy took off his fucking hat, and it was Howard Jones, and he sat down and played ‘You’re the fastest running but you just can’t win.’”
The interview concluded around 2 a.m. As the band headed back up to their cars, Jeff said, “We gotta get one of those 12 o’clock checkouts. Fuck 11 o’clock checkouts.”
The quote of the interview came from Porkchop. “I fucking love Oberlin. I like Ohio. If I should strike it, and actually become wealthy, or rich, my summer house will be in Toledo.”
Band members:
Clare Amory – vocals, electronics
Nathan Corbin – snths, drum box, electronics, drums
Dan Hougland – Synths, Drum Box, Electronics, piano
Jon Nicholson (aka Porkchop) – Vocals, Synths, Drum Box, Electronics, percussion
John Fell Ryan (aka Jeff)- Vocals, Synths, Drum Box, Electronics, Percussion
John Jon Williams- video artist
Lala Harrison (not at the show) – Vocals, flute, bass clarinet
