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Almost Better Than Dishwashing (But Not Quite): A Chat With Mouser
by The Bridge  photo by Stephanie Martin Oh, and there's a 3) Fuck integrity. You know who has tons of integrity? Tom Brokaw, probably. Ever read The Greatest Generation? Snore. Speaking of snoring, let me get to the point: Mouser. It's a band in the Dark Meat vein, size-wise, possibly owing to the fact that it got started at around the same time - a year and a half ago - and shares, as bands are wont to do around here, many of the same members. The musical philosophy is similarly loose, with a vast roster "Around eleven, these days," says band leader Joseph Colby Carter. The resultant sound - a vaguely folkish, rhythmic, horn-laced bit of punk experimentation that always sounds like an accordion is hiding somewhere in the melody - is a little less Led Zep, a little less earth-bound in general. It sounds like what might happen if Frank Zappa were fronting the Beatles while they played their songs sideways, with Muppets as guest vocalists and the Dead Milkmen's drummer. Plus horns. If that doesn't paint a clear picture for you - and honestly, I don't expect it will - then you will just have to accept that Mouser, like Dark Meat, are an Athens original that words will never serve adequately. The best you can do is listen. It will be worth it. So I happened upon this band well after everyone else in town had declared them a Big Fat Deal, nominating them for Best New Experimental Band at the Flagpole Athens Music Awards (which they won). After securing a job at the Bluebird Cafe (who should be firing me in a week or two), I checked out a Mouser set at the latest townie D.I.Y. venue, the Secret Squirrel. Like Tight Pockets and, I'm sure, countless others before it, the Secret Squirrel features dubious soundproofing, occasional bust-ups by the local 5-0, frequent keggers, and, by way of decor, moldy old sofas and the torsos of naked mannequins. These things are embedded into the DNA of house parties, and they are endlessly endearing. Trust me, rock n' roll always sounds better when there's egg cartons stapled to the ceiling. The set was a sprawling cache of filled-to-the-brim melodies that sounded like well-organized fender-benders - or, as Colby (he's too cheesy to go by his first name, too Peter-Pan complexed to be addressed by the surname) says, "It's just hilarious - just this massive wall of something going completely correct." Colby is, by the way, Bluebird Cafe's premiere dishwasher of the last three years. I mention this only because he insists, rather frequently, that dishwashing is his "true passion." This may be part of why we decided to conduct the interview at ye olde Bluebird Cafe, where we are sitting at an outdoor table that Colby has inexplicably decorated with a potato, two large jars of Jiffy brand peanut butter (creamy), a cheese grater, and a plastic mounted fish to whom someone has attached a sign reading "Eat More Tofu Baby." Three Things That You Probably Didn't Know About Colby (The Main Man Behind Mouser), But Surely Could Have Guessed:  photo by Stephanie Martin You can get this one pretty much from looking at the guy. He's a tall, lanky white boy, with the ruddy sort of complexion that usually accompanies slight inebriation - not a bad guess, according to Colby, who claims to have been fairly drunk since about age fourteen - and a dentifrice that, while not terribly unattractive, does seem to suggest an aversion to daily flossing. Then there are the clothes - for socks, think not even vaguely similar, and quite possibly smelly. For pants, think patches. For shirt, think the same one for a week straight, with all the friendly odors that sort of wear and tear will impart (and please understand that I am not one to cast stones. Anyone who has ever been around when I take my boots off can attest to that). All of which is in direct contradiction to his drummer, one Mercer West (yet another Bluebird employee), who looks like a Young Republican prep school kid. "That kid has a clean problem," Colby says, quite amiably, "But I. Love. Him," he adds, his voice lilting in mild self-mockery. "I'm messy, you know, in a creative way-I'm artistically messy. Yeah. Like in 'The Wall,' where he's placing the razor blades next to the broken guitar... and Mercer, he's artistically, umm, clean."  photo by Stephanie Martin "Mercer caught me 'rubbing one off' once. He totally used that phrase. I'd never heard that term for it before. Rubbing one off... hee-hee..." (Colby is one of the few people I have ever met who is given to actually making a 'hee-hee' sound, occasionally, when laughing.) "I tried to act like I wasn't. I tried to hide the tissue and the pillow and play it off - that was the thing, living there and paying rent to him - he was constantly checking up on me, not knocking," Colby laments. "Almost like he was looking for that, that one occasion - which he did find - I actually promised myself that if he ever did come in there while I was, hee, 'rubbing one off,' quote unquote, that I'd just keep going-" here he makes the international gesture for, You Know: "Like, 'Whassup, dude...?'" Alas, Colby failed to keep that promise, and the living situation is no more - a very good thing, Colby says. While the two musicians are "on the same page, musically," their temperaments are preciously opposed. It's something that's pretty obvious if you have ever seen them discuss almost anything offstage, and fairly hard to believe when you see them performing, when they seem to be quite a solid partnership. As for the rest of the band, they all came together in one long "It's a funny story..." sort of way. Colby, a born-n-bred resident of Gwinett County, made his way to Athens at age nineteen, when he lost his friends during a St. Patty's Day foray to Savannah. "I couldn't find my friends - it was pretty awful, this big parade and I was lost - and then I met these hippie sorta folks - I don't know, they smelled hilarious, and they had all these dogs, and they said, 'We're going to Athens,' and I thought, well, that's close enough to Gwinett, so I came back with them. And [when they got to Athens] then they told me that if I did the dishes I could hang out, so I did dishes, and took care of the dogs, and eventually I got a job dishwashing - which is my true passion - at the fabulous Bluebird Cafe, and my life really started coming together." He smiles without a hint of irony. Oh yeah, that brings us to  photo by Stephanie Martin "It is really hard on the hands. Construction work and dishwashing, that's two jobs that are really bad for musicians, physically. Hard on the hands. Good for masturbating, though, dishwashing. Soft hands." He goes on to offer some premium advice for those wishing to protect their strumming hands: use Brillo pads to grip the metal scrubbers. It's to keep your skin from "flaking off to the bone" later on, at practice. But seriously, he loves dishwashing. "The solitude... oooh," he sighs, sounding truly appreciative. "And if anyone talks to me - 'eh, my eggs are underdone, I want a to-go box'... Hey, I'm the dishwasher! I don't get paid shit, I'm justified to just be a punk. It's grand." After moving to Athens, Colby managed to have his heart broken by a girl who left him after five years "for a guy with a car," he says. Well, also, she was moving to Vermont, for college. And also "She grew up. She became an adult. I am apparently got stuck in the eighth grade." So, all of Mouser's songs are about heartbreak? "Nonono... they're mostly about food. Drugs, alcohol - a lot of consumption-related stuff. But I was pushed by heartbreak, maybe - not having a relationship anymore, which takes up virtually all of any one's time - it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me, because it left me with all this time to concentrate on what's really important, like dishwashing and... barn animal noises..." Mouser began, it seems, as an "experimental noise machine," consisting mainly of Colby and his friends Natasha (a drummer who later moved to California) and Georgie (name changed for reasons which will directly become obvious), fucking around and making barnyard animal noises, "in time to the beat, of course." Eventually, Georgie began to get a bad rap around town - "I don't know why; he never did anything to me," Colby shrugs - around the same time that Mouser began to develop into something more serious. "Georgie introduced me to Mercer," Colby explains, "And Mercer was like, you know, 'Georgie's not doing you justice. (Georgie, who still plays with the band sometimes, does percussion on a plastic cup. "I'm not sure how, but he does quite well. He plays the plastic cup, and he gets his own mike.") You need a real drummer.' And so he started playing for us. They [Georgie and Mercer] knew one another from Atlanta. Mercer was going to college there and Georgie was just hanging about the scene - he was trying to be a model, apparently-" Here Colby pauses, looking a little shame-faced. "I feel like I'm talking shit," he mutters. "But he was, and really, Georgie would be a great model. Seriously. If you've ever seen the kid in his undies... Good lookin' guy." At any rate, Mr. West became Mouser's drummer, and his unique drumming style proved to be entertaining for crowd members and band mates alike. "He looks like he's getting shocked in the butt," a young girl mused at a recent show. "When he first started playing for us, I thought something was going terribly wrong - like, something was happening, something that he hadn't told me about yet. Now it's just one of those things that cracks me up when we're playing, those horrible faces. It looks really painful. I don't know what to compare it to. But they're all perfectly in rhythm, those faces. Right on point." Mercer's Secret Squirrel connections meant instant exposure for the band, who played frequent sets there and subsequently gathered many local musicians as fans - fans eager to join the Mousy ranks. Soon Mouser boasted a full horn section and multiple guitarists, with talented hands from Subversivo, We Vs. the Shark, and the Music Tapes, to name a few, jumping happily on board. "So we got this kind of orchestra type situation, which is pretty stressful, because I don't know how to deal with all these people..." For simplicity's sake, Mouser ended up adopting the Dark Meat template for rehearsal, splitting the band into separate units - horn practice, bass-n-drums practice, barnyard animal noise practice ("That usually happens at Taco Stand," etc.) throughout the week, coming together about once a week for a full-on run through. Despite this discombobulation, the band is a pretty friendly, cohesive unit. "We all hang out. We play kickball together - plus, I'm homeless, so they all have to take me in anyway - they're all very supportive. I owe them. I'm going to buy everyone a big boat eventually. Even you," you adds, ever the diplomat. "Or maybe just one really big boat, and we'll all hang out on it together." Although he often protests that he's "shy and reserved," Colby's a terribly sociable guy, who seems to do very little without his friends. His losing-my-virginity story ("It was real meaningful, we were listening to Pink Floyd's 'Echos' and everything,") involves his pals - most of them on hallucinogens - busting into the room to tell him the cops had arrived. He went to the Y.D.C. (Youth Detention Center) for stealing condoms for a friend. His earliest musical endeavor was a rap group with his sister in the fifth grade. In short, he's a guy who's always up for a good time - or a weird time - or even a dubious, possibly ill-advised time, but ultimately unforgettable time. Which is perhaps a better description of Mouser's music than my earlier attempt. So what, in summation, I want to know, is Mouser's mission statement? The band is going places - shows are drawing larger crowds all the time, and there are plans in motion to record with the widely revered Andy Baker at the end of the year, so surely a grand plan is lurking somewhere in Colby's brain. "Well - we're highly influenced by the anti-folk scene in New York, bands like Doofus," he begins, soundly slightly rehearsed - but only slightly: "And... uh..." Since I have no idea who Doofus are, I ask if Joanna Newsome and Devandra Barnhart the kind of thing he's talking about. "Yeah, yeah... um, that is... well, no." Colby does not like to tell you you're wrong. "We're just good people," he says, slowly, "And we have, umm, good ears... and, we, we're, um..." he smiles helplessly. "I'm a dishwasher." Being as that's true, I switch off the tape recorder. He is a dishwasher. But Mouser is what you should be seeing, the very next time you have a chance. Comments [post a comment]Comments are closed |
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Friday, February 10, 2012
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