Minus the Bear

A conversation with Jake Snider

(August 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Hey, indie music lover, MSNBC has something to say to you (don’t they always?):  “Dust off your dancing shoes!”  The cause of such a proclamation is the new album, out August 23, from Seattle merrymakers Minus the Bear, an album so infectious that MSNBC was doing its aforementioned crowing back in June.  Even though most members of the nebulous group called “indie fans” probably have well-polished and well-used dancing shoes thanks to the past few years, it’s still advice worth heeding.  Menos el Oso is the type of indie-rock party that ain’t leavin’ till six in the morning.

And yet it is also the type of party where you find yourself looking at people from across the room and thinking, “Wow, we’re not kids anymore.”  Daydreams about the future are replaced—or, at the very least, forced to coexist—with regrets from the past.  Neither as fantastical nor high-tempo as Highly Refined Pirates (its predecessor), the new album is still packed with songs built to make the crowds bounce and sway, as befits a band that spends so much time listening to hip-hop.  Jake Snider found some time between summer barbecues to discuss Menos el Oso – and a bunch of other stuff, too.

The early press verdicts have been favorable, and a lot of people are claiming it’s a big step forward.  Do you feel that same way or do you feel that’s not fair to your previous albums?

I feel that’s pretty fair.  I’m more pleased with this record than any of our other ones, song-wise somewhat, but production-wise for sure.

As a band, you were much more involved in the production on this one. 

Yeah.  This is the first one we’ve collectively produced.  Matt did everything else except for [Highly Refined] Pirates.

Were you feeling shackled or stifled before?

We’d only really worked with one producer.  It was good experience, but I think we just wanted to do something ourselves and keep the costs down while still being able to explore everything we wanted to explore.

Lyrically, you explore some more somber terrain.  Without pressing for personal details, do you pull from experience or imagination when it comes time to write a song?

Both – and kind of mixed together.  It’s things that I’ve gone through or experienced, but I don’t think there’s a lot of good writing that’s too personal.  If you give somebody the story exactly as it happened to you, it’s usually not as exciting as if you embellish it a little bit.

It seems that Pirates was a little more fanciful – the racing around in yachts and what not.

Right.

Although I guess a few people took that seriously, according to some reviews I read online.  “They’re tremendously wealthy and bragging about it!”

Oh, that would be awesome.  I would love that.

The record is done and you guys don’t have to go off on tour for a while, so are having some downtime to enjoy the summer?

Yeah.  Matt’s recording and doing his thing and I’m hanging out and working on my house.  We’re going to barbecues and all that.  It’s pretty fun.  It’s a pretty nice summer.

Are you going to shows?  Or when you get a chance to take a break from music, do you really take a break?

I hate going to shows for the most part.  (laughs)  Not be too negative or anything…  I obviously go to see a lot of shows, but a lot of times I just get tired by the end of the night, or I feel like I’d rather be somewhere else, even if it’s a band that I really want to see.   But there are shows I really enjoy.  The last show that I really thought was great was the last time the Crystal Skulls played in town.  That was really amazing.

There’s a whole topic on your message board devoted to drunks.  Do you guys live out that decadent life out on the road, or is that in the past now?

We drink, for sure.  But we’ve toned it down from earlier tours, just because things are getting busier and we have to be on top of things a little better.

Any family guys in the band?

Oh, hell no. 

Married?

I’m married, yeah.  Nobody else is.  Everybody has their people.

Ah, the groupies.  Musically, you guys are noted for bringing some partytime into a genre that can be a little staid.  When The Bear is hanging at barbecues and needing to get the party going, what gets put on the speakers?

Any kind of hip-hop for the most part.  The barbecue that I was at last night was Madvillain and Danger Mouse and Four Tet.  Of course, Jay-Z and 50 Cent were there.

When you guys are playing a city like L.A., is it harder to connect with the crowd?  A lot of bands come through town and seem frustrated because no one is pogoing around.

I don’t know.  Our shows in the more pretentious towns are getting—I don’t mean to say pretentious, I mean to say the shier towns or the more jaded towns—they’re getting better.  I just figure if they paid to see the show, especially if it’s a headlining tour, that even if they’re not into it, they probably like it.  More times than not, after a show where you think the crowd sucked, tons of people will come up to you and tell you that it was fun.  You can never really tell.  And I’m not rocking out when I go to see a show.  I just watch the show.

What’s Seattle like in that regard?

Oh, Seattle has a real hipster vibe with very little rocking out.  People in Seattle will rock out a little bit when they know it’s a band they’re supposed to rock out to.

But it sounds like a pretty nurturing city for musicians.

Yeah, definitely.  It’s a great place to play music in that regard.  It’s a horrible place to tour from, to have to go hundreds of miles to play any show at all.  But the people who play music around here definitely make up for it.

This is way off the topic, but whatever happened to your website, Friction USA?

(chuckles)  Oh, it’s just gone.  Once I started doing the band stuff seriously, I didn’t really have the time to focus on it and make it work.

It was kind of in line with Suicide Girls or something? 

Yeah.  They pretty much have the whole market cornered.

From porn to politics – if you guys got mega-big, what’s a pet cause you could see yourself adopting?

Depending on the timeframe or depending on who’s in Washington at the time, I would definitely do whatever I could—and I’d hope the band would be into it—to get the neocons out of the White House.  I mean, I personally feel that it’s ridiculous that anyone could think that anyone in the Administration is doing a good job at all.  They’re just killing people and lying and committing crimes. 

Working in a liberal business, living in a liberal city, were you surprised by the second term?

Oh, I knew.  I knew.  They control the fricking voting boxes.  It’s tough to compete with that.  I don’t think it was a legal election.  I even bet Dave, our guitar player, a thousand dollars that Bush would win, just because I knew he was going to win.  Then we changed it to a steak dinner.

That would have been doubly painful for Dave.  Bush wins and he’s a grand in the hole.

Exactly.  And then I win no matter what, right?