The Mae Shi

A conversation with Tim Byron

(April 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

The guys in The Mae Shi really like music.  Does this go without saying for people in a band?  Not at all.  As evidenced by a browse through the archives here, some musicians don't particularly enjoy things like going to shows or listening to music made by other people.  The Mae Shi are of a different breed entirely, the sort of breed that takes their favorite snippets from 1,200 songs and puts them on a supercollider of a mix tape that is given out as a thank you to those who have supported them or turned them on to new music (one post at their website delights in an introduction to Fefe Dobson and a reintroduction to Wreckx-n-Effect).  They're the sort of band that gets so excited by other bands that they not only end up touring together, but releasing albums together - which leads us to Don't Ignore the Potential, their new (well, not so new...but we'll get to that with the first question) split CD with Rapider Than Horsepower (featuring ex-members of Racebannon).

The Mae Shi bring plenty of zeal to their half of the disc, blending technological fascination and DIY experimentation with primitive punk crunch and art-rock obfuscation.  They both defy and embrace the iTunes generation; sometimes a listener can get an unusually thorough glimpse into a Mae Shi song from a 30-second sample, since the song only lasts a few seconds beyond the cutoff time.  But the songs on Don't Ignore the Potential are a tad longer, rendering 30-second clips useless on epic songs like opener "The Potential" (sprawling runtime - 3:27 ), which has three wholly distinct sections.  Their output is messy and frantic and sometimes quite funny and, sure, a little ADD...and it'll probably drive at least a few of your friends bonkers.  All good things.

Also newly available is the well-stuffed DVD Lock the Skull, Load the Gun, which contains over 30 music videos from friends and cohorts, as well as a documentary of the band's first trek across America (a quick, entertaining trailer is viewable at the band's website).  Bassist/singer Tim Byron took a break from working on some new material to talk to The Red Alert about the new DVD, the band's interesting touring history, and their fortuitous meeting with Rapider Than Horsepower.

Let’s start by clearing up some release dates.  I know the DVD is newly out, but what about the split CD?

That’s a wonderful question.  5RC is kind of a big label and they have solid release dates that mean something—for the DVD, it was April 11th.  Strictly Amateur Films is a smaller label, and it takes them a while longer to get things out.  The split has been out since last May in Europe.  We’ve had them in our hands and have been selling them at shows since November, but I think it’s not out officially until May 2006.

So what’s been going on lately, then?  Writing songs?

Yeah, we just recorded a new batch of songs and have been working on them.  We’re trying to get another full-length done this summer for 5RC.  The future is kind of up in the air.  We came back from tour—we played a whole lot of shows last year.  I think we played like 100 shows, and we were on tour for about 15 weeks.  Between the beginning of last year and the end of last year, I quit my job, and other people had their lives get changed around, because we were taking it seriously for the first time.  It’s hard—it’s hard to come back and figure out how you’re going to make money and all that.  It was a taxing year.  It was really fun, but it was also lots and lots and lots of work.  It got to the point when we came back, we didn’t even want to see each other.  If you’re in a van with six weeks with anyone, that happens.

So, yeah, it took us a while to get back to doing what we’re doing, but now we’ve started up again.  We probably still won’t be playing shows until July or August so—which is weird for us because usually we play all the time.  Clubs in L.A. don’t like us because we play too often.

Because it hurts draw?

Well, clubs like The Smell, they don’t care about that at all.  But the theory with bigger clubs is that you should only play once every two months or whatever.

The DVD is pretty jam-packed with content.  At what point did you realize you had a proper full release on your hands?

As soon as we found out that 5RC was putting out the record Terrorbird in 2004, they were like, “What else do you have on our plate?”  And we wanted to this DVD—it was something we’d been talking about since we formed the band, that it would be fun to take advantage of other media forms.  One of the things that makes it so easy for us to make music these days is that it’s so cheap, you can make music on a regular desktop computer.  That’s also true of movies and DVDs these days; it doesn’t take a huge investment to get started and make something.  It just seemed like the next DIY step, to try to make our own DVD.

I think at the time Brad and Ezra were both at CalArts as students, so we just started asking all of our creative friends if they would direct a video or contribute something.  By the end of the summer, we had a dozen videos and just kept going.  We brought our friend along to film the very first tour we did, and so there’s an hour-long tour documentary that is totally random…and totally retarded.

As a first tour should be.  Did you have parameters for what your friends could or couldn’t do with the videos?

When we asked people to do it, I think all we did was give them a CD-R of Terrorbird and we gave them the lyrics to the songs and a one-sheet thing that was like a Cliffs Notes to the songs and what we thought they were about.  We didn’t even say, “Do this one video,” and, as a consequence, there are songs that have three videos for them.  But it’s kind of neat because everyone got on the same page, and almost all of the videos are really for the particular songs.  People put a lot time into making sure they were special.

Outside of your own catalog, do you have a favorite music video?  Anything memorable that jumps to mind?

Not really.  None of us have cable or anything, so we don’t have a lot of chances to watch videos and know what’s out there.  I definitely enjoyed when LAUNCHcast started a few years ago and you could search for any band and they had a lot of random videos from bands in the ‘90s that I didn’t think would have videos, like Superchunk or Jawbreaker.

In an interview we did with Liars, they were saying that not only was their DVD for Drum’s Not Dead an interesting creative process, but it was also a way of giving people an incentive for actually buying albums instead of just downloading or burning or whatever.  Did that factor in for you guys, too?

I think so.  We’re definitely into the business side of thing, and I like to look at trends.  And, “Okay, no one is really buying CDs anymore, fewer people are buying CDs because of piracy and this and that.  Aron’s Records in closing down, Rhino is closing down.  How are bands going to make money in the future?”  The band Lightning Bolt, I bought their DVD when they came through like four years ago, and I thought it was a great idea.  The Fugazi DVD was the same way.

Now that we’ve gotten started, we’ve realized that, as a business venture, the DVD isn’t going to make any money.  It took so many people.  We only spent like 100 bucks on it, and all our friends worked for free; we offered them like one percent of future sales, which will probably be nothing, because it’s harder to sell a DVD; there are few markets for them, and most music stores don’t have DVD sections—or, if they do, they’re selling U2 DVDs or whatever.  So it’s not a proven business move, but it was fun to make, and I hope we make another one.

And on top of that, DVDs can provide fans with another level of getting to know the band.

Yeah, totally.  And I remember when I watched that Lightning Bolt DVD for the first time, it was fun to see footage of a show I’d been at years before, trying to find myself in the frame or whatever.

Also, I think the tour footage is pretty bleak.  A lot of it is us playing to six people in a bathroom in Pittsburgh, stuff like that.  Our shows in L.A.—and New York, to some extent—are big, fun, exciting shows…but it might be fun for those people to see how shitty it can be.  (laughs)  I mean, it’s not bad, and we have fun with those shows, but I think if you’re watching it as an outsider, it might be a little bit of a bummer. 

Does the qualification of “having a good show” hinge on the audience?  Are you able to play in front of a lukewarm audience and still come away feeling good about what you did on stage?

Totally.  I don’t think we ever blame the audience, though.  I’ve seen bands play in L.A. and I’ve been one of like six people in the audience.  I saw Ex Models play to eight people or whatever, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world that I was one of those eight people that got to see that show.  I never thought, “Wow, they’re probably bummed because they’re going to make like twelve dollars for this show”—but that stuff plays into it when you’re on the road, times when you’re running out of money and gas is three dollars a gallon and you’re driving 300 miles a day.  You play a show to six people and you’re just worried.

But I think we definitely made the best of it with most of those shows.  We played a show in Salt Lake City where the promoter basically gave up on the show and wasn’t even in town when we showed up.  It got moved like three times and ultimately we were playing this coffee shop with this like sixty-year-old singer/songwriter named Buddha Pi.  There was no one there, but we saw some cool kids outside—they had Locust patches or something—and we got like six people to come inside and we played a really fun show in front of like six people.  Two days later, there was a review of that show on the Web, and someone had written about it and how much fun it was.  If it’s a good show, odds are it will have a life of its own.

The show in Pittsburgh, we set up in the downstairs basement bathroom because there wasn’t anyone there anyway.  It was like six people, and we crammed everyone into the bathroom and played the show there.  That was really fun, too.

With the CD, I know The Mae Shi had played with Rapider Than Horsepower before.  Was there the sense that your fans would get them and be into them, and vice versa?

That’s a good question.  We hadn’t met Rapider before we went on tour with them.  We’re all music nerds and we all have our favorite bands, and part of booking our first tour was reaching out to those favorite little bands in every city that we were going to play, and asking if they’d play a show with us in their hometown.  In the case of Rapider, they were like “Well, why don’t we do a whole tour together?”  It was this random situation where we were going to be on the show for three weeks with them and we hadn’t even met them—but by the end of the three weeks, we were super close and all got along really well…so well that we decided to do a six-week tour in Europe together.

So, I don’t know…we like them and they like us a whole lot—and if we like them, maybe the people who like us should like them.  I think they do a lot of the same stuff that we do, just in a kind of different way.  They’re into trying to take weird influences and put them together; they kind of remind me of Captain Beefheart and mainstream hip-hop at the same time, somehow.  I can’t think of a whole lot of other bands that we’d like to do a split record with. 

Are you all doing music outside of The Mae Shi, or is it a Metallica sort of thing where it’s all band all the time?

Oh, there’s a lot of music that’s done outside of the band.  Ezra is a band called Gowns, and Jeff is in a band called L.A. Riots.  Brad wants to produce pop music, and he’s working on trying to do that.  In my case, it’s the only band I’m in, but I’m always trying to get other things off the ground.  So there’s a lot of music on the side; it’s definitely not a Metallica thing.

Well, maybe that will prevent a therapeutic documentary in 15 years.

Well, that’s probably one of my favorite movies of all time, Some Kind of Monster.  I think it’s one of the few movies that everyone in the band can agree is totally amazing.

Yeah, I was a huge Metallica fan as a kid, so it was interesting to catch up with them all these years later.

That footage of Dave Mustaine is amazing, isn’t it?

Totally.  You know, those guys fled L.A., but how’s the city treating you lately, musically and otherwise?

I love L.A..  It’s been a really good place to develop as a band, I think.  We’ve been around for about three and a half years now, and there are a lot of other bands that we’ve met and grown up with and gone through things with—and it’s a really supportive network.  Maybe 75% of the shows we play in L.A. are at The Smell downtown, and that’s been a really supportive place.  We’ve bonded with all the bands that play there.  L.A. is such a big geographic area that you can play shows all the time and still have people show up and care; you can play in Riverside or the Valley or Valencia.

And there’s a huge amount of difference with crowds and venues depending on what part of town you go to.

Yeah, totally.  I think there’s this smog in L.A. of all these people who come to get famous and flex their egos—and that’s fine and makes a lot of money for the city as a whole—but underneath that, there’s a serious, solid working class city that’s very down to earth and has a lot of history.