An interview with Portland Band, Hockey
Hockey throwing down at Redlands University, CA
Hockey turned up on my radar when Peter Murray, who works with Pink Martini, slipped a CD into my hand at a Grammy discussion I was holding at Nemo last month. After hearing their excellent new album, Mind Chaos, I thought I’d interview the boys in the band……here it is.
1. Tell me about your experience on Epic/Columbia.
A few weeks after Benny and I graduated from college we met our big time, high roller managers in LA. They filled us with hope and confidence about this song and that song being a “smash” etc. Things seemed totally great for a while. We had our budget college demos shopped around to a bunch of record execs, played some pants-shitting showcases and eventually signed with Epic records. The decision from there was to put us in the studio to rerecord our “hits” (this direction came directly to us from the biggest fat cat at the top of the Sony music shit heap- we’re practically famous!). So we hit the studio with the hope of a quick three months and then hitting the road- Europe, Japan, Letterman! Three months turned into a year and a half. We spent time with two different producers in LA before landing with Jerry Harrison from the Talking heads in San Francisco. Throughout the process Benny and I were slowly beaten into the ground by the pressure of having to please the suits. Compounded with the fact that we were a two-piece with little to no live show and no touring base, we just didn’t have the songs, or the wherewithal to put the whole thing together (we blame ourselves). Eventually we were moved from Epic to Columbia, a bigger label where two guys called Hockey were even more liable to get lost in the shuffle. In the studio the producers wanted radio pop gloss and we wanted to be cool and make young people music. Our managers wanted this and that, and the label wanted Gnarles Barkley’s “crazy”. When all was said and done we kept all the money and the gear they bought us and moved to Spokane. We were officially dropped by a letter from our lawyer a few months later. NO shit.
2. Why did you move to Portland?
We moved to Portland last fall looking for a small yet up and coming music scene, a place filled with art and music and young people and all that counter culture and on and on. Seattle seemed totally gigantic and apocalyptic to us while Spokane was just way out there, isolated and off the map (duh). Portland made sense as an in between, and still located in the beautiful and enchanted northwest. We love it! Riding bikes and… just thinking…random…thoughts.
3. You’re about to hit the road, how are you traveling?
We’ve got an old (OLD) ford passenger van that we bought from our friends The Trashies (rip) in Seattle. Its creepy as hell (the ladies tell us) with big heavy blackout curtains and blue shag carpeting. The ride is quite comfortable though, all our sweaty butts in our own captains chairs. We also hooked up a trailer for our gear so its 35 mph over the mountains, baby! The good news is with our stuff in tow, we can sleep stretched out in the way back. The bad news is, that’s the good news.
4. Where and how did you record the new album?
We started recording our record last fall at a rented rehearsal space in industrial northwest Portland. The room was the size of broom closet and it had a strange stain on the wall that never dried. We named the stain “grossey” but ended doing mostly demos of the songs there. In November we ran out of money and had to move home. We made do by throwing some crappy sound boards on the walls of a room in our basement (sorry Chris and Jessie) and made a ton of noise there to record the record. We did it all on our own and it took us forever and drove us to the outer reaches of human sanity, what the MIND can absorb! But we’re really happy with the way things turned out! J
