Endless Boogie: The 13th Floor Interview

The relentless riff machine that is Endless Boogie returns to Auckland for one show at The Tuning Fork on Sunday, April 23rd.

The band is on the verge of releasing their new album, Vibe Killer, and will, no doubt, preview a track or two when they are here.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to vocalist/guitarist Paul Major, who is also a world-renown record collector. Needless to say, they had plenty to talk about as they reminisced about the good old days of New York punk and trippin’ to Kiss.

Click here to listen to the interview with Endless Boogie:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

PM: I hear you’re from Rochester.

MD: That’s true. I did move to New Zealand from Rochester, New York. I lived there for many years; about twenty five years. Have you been to Rochester?

PM: … No… that’s one place we haven’t been. But, back in the day, when I was… living up in New Hampshire, getting my rare record catalogues going through the mail, I used to get many records out of The House of Guitars…

MD: Oh, I worked at The House of Guitars for many years.

PM: Ah ha! Actually, the first encounter I had with House of Guitars was back in circa ’82, ’83: I was a phone salesman for an import record company; so, House of Guitars was one of the accounts. I can’t even remember who I used to talk to.

MD: It was probably Greg Prevost, or somebody like that.

PM: Yeah, it wasn’t Greg. It was somebody else that was the buyer at that time…. But after that, when I started doing the rare records thing, I started getting contacts in every city; and I can’t remember their names either: a couple of people up in Rochester say, “Go by The House of Guitars!” – “You guys keep telling me I’m a fool not to come there myself.” I said, “Just go and buy every weird, homemade, local record you find that’s really cheap in there, and just send them to me. You’re guaranteed there’ll be some winners in there. It’ll be worth your while.”

MD: It’s been awhile since I’ve been to the HOG, but it was a great place to hang out, back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, that’s for sure. That’s where I learned all about punk rock. Greg Prevost, who is also the lead singer of The Chesterfield Kings… he worked at The House of Guitars in 1974, when I just got out of high school and I was old enough to drive; and the first place I drove was to The House of Guitars. He’d run the 45 counter there, and he would say, “Oh, you like David Bowie; well, here’s Mott the Hoople,” or, “Here’s T Rex,” and it went on from there.

PM: Those were the days!

MD: Indeed!

PM: We’re similar ages, then.

MD: Yes, I think you’re about a year older than me, possibly…

PM: Yeah, something like that. That’s what got me up to New York City, originally: were those punk rock days, coming out of the mid-west.

MD: So, you’re from St. Louis?

PM: I went to college in St. Louis. I’m from Louisville, Kentucky, originally. When I was seventeen or eighteen – I forget whatever  – I went to St. Louis, and I spent four years there. In the early ‘70s, that pre-punk thing was happening, and there were a few bands around by ’76 that were into the punk stuff. We put on a punk rock festival, in St. Louis, in January ’77… which was pretty crazy. So, yeah, in that time period, I was already a record fanatic – with all the obscure records and the garage psyche, that was the stuff that appealed to me as a kid – and then when that punk ’77 thing came around… “Oh wow!”

MD: It sounds like we have parallel lives. I put on Rochester’s first punk rock show: it was Pere Ubu and The Suicide Commandos; it was great!

PM: Holy shit! Yeah!

MD: And my buddy and I drove from the university in Brockport, which is in up-state new York, down to CBGBs in ’76 or ’77, and arrived there at around three in the afternoon, and we’re like, “Hey! We’re here to see the Ramones. What’s going on?” It was everything you could want, because when the show started, there was David Johansen in the audience and John Cale, and all these people; it was amazing!

PM: I can imagine. I was just a little later, because I… moved into Manhattan in January ’78, but spent a few months out in New Jersey, in a house… that a guy had, who was in a band… called The Sick Fucks…. I remember the first time coming to the city in the fall of ’77, the first band we ever saw at CBGB – the first time we drove in after we got there – was The Cramps; just when Nick Knox started playing drums for them, and then it was all over from then…. What times those were!

MD: Exactly! I went to a… benefit for St. Mark’s Church at CBGBs, and The Cramps were on the bill – I saw them and The Mumps, and all those – just amazing! The whole vibe was just fantastic; you can’t beat it.

PM: Such a tiny scene then; the whole thing. It was just a few hundred people, really, and it was just amazing.

MD: And so, now you’re going from watching bands that play…I mean The Ramones’ longest song was barely three minutes long…and now you’re in Endless Boogie.

PM: Right, I’ve been known to play one song for the entire set!

MD: How does that work? Is it the same mind set, just expanded somehow?

PM: Yeah, it’s like that initial spark: if it’s feeling good, we’ll just keep going with it. Usually, we’ll squeeze in two to four numbers, or something, and there were periods where we would actually do a few fairly short versions of things; but… when we play, we never really even know what we’re going to play. Jesper usually calls the thing, when we’re set up and ready to go. He’ll just start with the riff, and we’re like, “Okay, that one,” and it’ll just go on until some kind of vibe comes, “Okay, maybe it’s time to… get the landing gear open and do another one,” and sometimes it’s like, “No. We’ll just keep changing it,” and… different things will happen. Sometimes you’ll throw, in the middle, a riff from another song: we’ll be doing some kind of jam, and we’ll hear him starting up GOD – Lobby Lloyde and The Coloured Balls riff – and then that will become part of the same jam… we never know where it’s going.

MD: When you guys hooked up originally – obviously, the name of the band reflects the fact that that’s probably what the intention was – was that what you guys were talking about doing, when you first started playing together?

PM: What happened was I had known the original drummer in the band, Johann, who was from Sweden at the time, and I had known him through the record collecting thing in the late ‘80s; and I was married, living up in New Hampshire, and then that fell apart, and I came back to New York at the beginning of the ‘90s. He came over and did a thing founding Matador Records, with Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi; so, he was over here, and Jesper came over a little later, when he’d left Matador to go work for Rick Rubin, out in LA; so, he was gone for a while, but when he came back to New York, found out he had had this idea – and even a drawing from years before – Endless Boogie; so then, the idea was Jesper and Johann were like, “We must have a band called Endless Boogie. And it will be a band just to have fun, jam, and we’ll never play shows.” Later in the ‘90s, we started doing that. For years, we would just get together on Tuesday nights, drink some beer and jam. And eventually, people twisting our arms got us to play shows. We just took it from there, not really changing what we were doing that much, but figuring, “Okay… we’ll do it,” and then it was going down kinda good; so, it just slowly built up over the years.

MD: You’ve got a new album coming out, Vibe Killer, which is imminently being released.

PM: Yeah, that’s all done; it’s very imminent, finally. At our usual pace, it takes a couple years between records. We don’t move real fast, as far as that goes, but we’d started quite a long time ago – recorded a whole bunch of live in the studio jams – and eventually finished it up after some broken bones and stuff slowing us down in between.

MD: Yeah, you broke your arm, right?

PM: Yeah, so, I couldn’t play guitar for four or five months. And then Marc, our bass player, had a skateboarding accident, and he broke his hand. In fact, that’s why he wasn’t with us last year, when we went to Australia – I guess almost exactly a year ago – he had just broken his hand; so, we had to bring a friend, Brad, along, playing bass instead of Marc. Marc, of course, was bummed out, because of the good times he had over there and in New Zealand, when we made it over there… the previous times.

MD: Last time you were in New Zealand was about five years ago, or so?

PM: … It was the tour before last, whenever that was; so, it was several years, for sure….

MD: Someone told me you jammed with Doug Jerebine when you were here; is that right?

PM: Yeah! That was awesome! We’re huge fans of him. He’s a legend to us, with the Jesse Harper and The Human Instinct, and everything; so, it was incredible; and the place in Auckland and the other jams going down. He had this insane guitar he’d built himself, with like six million strings on it, or something! I remember we played some numbers, and then we’d launch into a Sister Ray rip off groove type of thing, and it just went wild, in the best way; it was fantastic! It’s always exciting for us, whenever we get the chance to be with, and even jam sometimes, with the people that are godlike legends to us.

MD: Does that happen in a lot of the places you go to around the world…?

PM: Here and there. Usually,more like we meet them if they’re not playing anymore, but we have gotten to meet people here and there, and bumped into various people, but not that often that we get to actually jam like we did with him.

MD: Do you do some record collecting when you’re travelling?

PM: Yeah. I guess with my long life of doing it, and before the internet, and all that kind of stuff…. It used to be that when we would go someplace, we had to go to the used record store, but after all the information got up on the internet, you’d dig through the stores, everything has been overpriced on the internet. They look up everything, even the most impossibly under the radar record that just looks like you would never listen to it; they’ve checked it out. Even the weird private pressings that just look like some doofus folk or country album, that I would always buy for a dollar… because every once in a while, you’d play one, and it would be deranged; those days are kinda gone. We’d go and find a few things we wanted, but that thrill, way back when, has been long gone. Sometimes, if we’re feeling a little bit low from the show before, we’ll skip on the record vibe. We always make it out to Vicious Sloth’s, in Melbourne, because Glen’s been a friend of ours a long time; so, we go by and see him. Usually, if there’s a day off, we’ll still hit record stores; but if it’s a stretch of shows every night, we’re recovering from the night before, and don’t always make it.

MD: It’s interesting how the internet has affected record collecting. Like you say, everybody knows about everything, and everything is on YouTube – it’s amazing, the obscure things that are on there.

PM: Yeah! It’s like a double edged sword for me: I think it’s fantastic that hundreds of thousands of people are listening to the Morgan album, and all these obscure things. All these records I discovered way back – like Dark and Marcus and Fraction and New Dawn – back in those days, there’ll be the small circle of collectors around the world that are putting out these paper catalogues – people you know here and there through corresponding – never imagine… that everything would be at everybody’s finger tips; so, I’m glad about that, because it’s preserved all these people that have had no success. They were so bummed out when I used to track them down to see if they had any records left: the first thing they’d be saying is, “Okay, I know it’s you Jerry, putting on another voice…” you know, one of his friends, “… just playing a practical joke on me,” and I’m like, “ No! I’ve got your record right here. I’ll pay you a lot of money for every copy you can find;” it’s all changed. It sort of destroyed the ‘candy store’ that every used record store used to be for me, back in the day, where I knew that wherever they keep the stuff they think is total garbage, is where all the great stuff is going to be. Then again, in the big picture, I’m jacked that it’s preserved, it’s out there, young kids are getting into it now.

MD: I’ve heard a couple of tracks from the new album, and of course, I love the one, Back in ’74, which you detailed as a Kiss concert that you went to at a kite flying festival.

PM: Yeah, I was actually there! That was a crazy day! It was Jesper’s idea. Actually, that’s where my arm was broken. We were supposed to record a jam for somebody  using some movie at this place called Red Bull Studio – my arm was broken; so, I couldn’t play guitar; so, I just did the vocals – and then Jesper said, “Why don’t you riff on that Kiss concert you told me about, in ’74?” I just tried to put myself back in that crazy head… I mean, it was frightening – we were terrified once the band stopped playing, because we had dropped acid on the way in; so, we would start getting off right when the band played – and we made our way through about twenty thousand people – hippies, rednecks, and whatever – but we had those theatre students from our college with us, who had shaved their eyebrows off, because David Bowie had shaved his eyebrows off; so, that didn’t go down too good with the people in the crowd: they’re looking at him like, “What are these weirdos?” And we’re tripping – Kiss stops, we’re tripping, and bottles are flying at us – it was like Fellini’s Satyricon or something getting out of hell… going through all these crowds, and people throwing shit at us, and punching us; and, of course, being tripping, it seemed like it took twenty years to get out of there…. We found out later that it was considered the break through show for Kiss. Before their first album was out… they had gotten a reputation – they’d be playing the bigger clubs, in places with hundreds of people, maybe up to a thousand – and that was like their first huge appearance. I looked a little bit about Kiss, on the internet, and they’re like, “We have this special thing for St. Louis: that was the flash point where we knew we were going to take over the world.”

MD: For better or for worse, I guess.

PM: Yeah, yeah! Right! Exactly! I was never a huge fan, but that show was fantastic! The whole thing was fantastic, but I guess, with all the shit I’m into, and the hard rock I’m into, I’m like, “Okay, I can dig this. It’s good pop hard rock.” I can dig what they do, but… it doesn’t really thrill me.

MD: You being from that part of the world: we just had the recent death of Chuck Berry. I’m wondering if you have any reminisces or observations on Mr. Berry and his influences?

PM: No. We never ran into him…. I guess he was more in a laying low vibe. We did used to hang out at that bar, Blueberry Hill, on Delmar, in University City, in St. Louis, where, supposedly, in his later days,[he would hang out there and occasionally play. For me, I guess, thinking, “Well, okay, a rock and roller made it to ninety years old.” Going back, he is the dude where John Lennon, I think, said once that if they had to rename rock and roll, they should just call it Chuck Berry. And you hear that guitar and the whole thing – I was, of course, a little later: twelve years old at the end of 1966… – and hearing Psychotic Reaction and The Music Machine, Talk Talk. That’s what launched me into it; but shortly after that, of course, I’m hearing some Chuck Berry songs, and thinking, “Oh, whoa!” It seemed like ancient history when you’re a twelve year old kid….

MD: I went to the Wembley Rock and Roll Show, in ’72 – and it was Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis; all these guys – and I remember thinking, “Holy mackerel, there’s Chuck Berry! He’s forty two years old! I’m amazed he’s physically even able to strap on a guitar!”

PM: And he’s still doing it when he’s twice that old and beyond; still playing! It’s awesome! His stuff is so fantastic. He really was a breakthrough dude, with all those words he put in the whole deal.

MD: When you get down to New Zealand here, how many shows are you doing?

PM: Just the one I know about. I know there were three the other time that we made it there; so, I don’t know exactly, with the timing, if some other thing might possibly pop up. I’m a little fuzzy on the logistics, but, presumably, just the one.

MD: And we’re going to hear quite a bit from Vibe Killer, are we?

PM: You’ll hear some Vibe Killer action; although, you never know, because we don’t really decide what we’re going to play until we start playing it. It depends: it could be some Vibe Killer stuff, or there could be a long jam that moves into part of one of those zones. There have been a couple of shows we played, more recently, where a few of those things off Vibe Killer emerged in the middle of the set.

Click here for tickets to see Endless Boogie at The Tuning Fork April 23rd.