Otis
Electric Landlady (CherryDisc)
An interview with Mike Hill, Kevin O’Connor, and Joshua Scott
by J. Fritz and M.I. MacDonald
Sick of interviewing yet?
Mike: Sure. Everyone asks you the same retarded questions. “Do you like the Boston scene? Blah blah blah,” these really stupid questions about the scene and playing at the Middle East. It’s all bullshit.
I was told that you guys like to tell interviewers outrageous stories and completely fictitious tales. Is that true?
Mike: For the most part, yeah.
Kev: We usually get misquoted anyway, so we just lie.
Mike: If we don’t lie about ourselves, somebody else will lie about us. We used to try to tell the truth, but then when you read the interview, it’s always misquoted. It’s always a big mess.
Kev: Plus, it’s just more fun to make up some crap.
Any outrageous stories you want to share?
Mike: The true stories probably no one believes. Lopez, the one-armed bandit. That’s a good one. He’s a Mexican revolutionary in Huntington, West Virginia who has a stumpy arm that ends below his elbow.
Josh: Tim of V.Card videotaped him attacking Mike; punching him with his stump.
Really attacking?
Josh: He was pretty malicious about it.
Mike: He was pretty evil-looking.
Kev: He was drunk… drunk as a punk, man.
Josh: It was pretty belligerent.
You went on tour in the Fall of ’94 for the first time?
Mike: Yeah, we had a demo.
Josh: That winter was just about the worst time ever. We were at Diamond rehearsal studios with the skin jar of piss.
Mike: That was the winter prior to our big tour. Yeah, that was a bad winter.
Kev: I think the whole beginning was really fucked up because we kept having line-up changes and stuff.
Josh: Yeah, we had a serial killer for a while.
You want to expand on that a little?
Josh: No.
Kev: We had, like, four drummers at first.
Mike: Not at the same time, obviously.
Kev: If only!
Mike: Yeah, we had a couple of different drummers early on. We had this ultra Pantera-style guy who hit his cymbals a lot, and this kid who accused me of being this jock knucklehead guy or something.
Kev: We got rid of him, you know.
Josh: We put him in the skin jar of piss.
What’s the worst gig you ever had to play?
Mike: Well, let’s see… there’s several worst gigs we had to play. I think the Omaha one where we opened for some Christian metal band on a Monday night and they had a huge draw, but we played to one person. While we played, their fans waited outside for us to finish.
Kev: Because we’re evil.
Josh: And we bummed a lady out by saying we sold our souls to Satan to get where we are.
Mike: That was probably the most humiliating gig we ever did.
Josh: There were several bad gigs in Jersey.
Kev: All of ’em, the whole state.
Josh: Asbury Park, the Fast Lane. It’s all bad.
Is it the places or the audience that’s bad?
Mike: What audience? When people come, they want to hear Bon Jovi and stuff like that. The funniest thing is that there’re so many great bands from Jersey, like the Misfits, Deadguy, and Rorschach. There are some incredible bands from Jersey, but I don’t know where they played.
When did you sign with Cherrydisc?
Mike: Around January of ’95.
I heard the first Otis disc didn’t take long to record.
Mike: No, it took about two days. We were going to put it out ourselves. At the time, we just decided we needed to have a record out. We were going to just do it like a lot of bands do, just try to get the finances together. But then at some point, some of the people from Cherrydisc came down to our shows and the guy that engineered our record, he had a label, like some small hobby that he has, and he wanted to put it out at the last minute. But his deal just wasn’t good enough.
Mike: He was a day late and a dollar short, and he complained a lot and jumped up and down like a big baby.
What influenced your decision to sign with Cherrydisc?
Josh: I think it was all the cock.
Kev: The money, the cock, and they were a good operation for their size.
Josh: They were a professional operation, and they have more than one guy working for them
Kev: They’ve got good national distribution. They have their own phone number, unlike most indie labels.
Mike: They’re a good label. They got us a European licensing deal and all this other stuff. They do a good job.
Electric Landlady, your latest disc, came out on March 26th. How does it differ from the first release?
Mike: It sounds better.
Kev: It’s longer.
Josh: Better songs.
Kev: This one’s fortified with vitamins and minerals.
Josh: Better artwork.
Mike: We used a better engineer.
Kev: And a better studio. And better tape.
Mike: We spent more time. We had more equipment.
Josh: We have rack mount equipment and we call it “gear” now, as opposed to earlier we didn’t.
Kev: Yeah, we used to just have “stuff.”
Josh: We used to just have “shit.” Now we have “gear.”
Kev: And it’s expensive too, because we’re rich.
How do you put the songs together? What does the songwriting process consist of?
Mike: We take Sabbath tunes and backtrack, play them backwards. That’s how we come up with our lyrics.
Josh: We just steal a riff from a band like Unsane, Helmet, or Guzzard, and then play it loud. Then, for step two, we play it soft with menacing-sounding vocals. Then we repeat steps one and two for about six minutes and end the song. That’s our formula.
Do you plan to stay with Cherrydisc for a while?
Mike: We’ve still got one more record with them.
When will you be recording that?
Josh: As soon as possible.
Mike: Probably this summer.
Can I assume it’s written already then?
Mike: Partially.
Kev: Yeah, most of it.
Are any major labels sniffing around yet?
All: No.
Kev: Actually, if you’re going to write it down, you should say that they all are.
Josh: Yeah, everybody’s actually interested in us. We’ve already had a few offers for $5 million.
Kev: What’s that guy’s name from Atlantic?
Josh: Yeah, we had Al Smith and we had… let’s see, Touch And Go was calling us with a giant contract.
Kev: Thurston Moore came over to my house the other day.
Josh: Yeah, Thurston Moore called us because he has his own little DGC sub-label now.
Mike: Our equipment is too nice for him.
Where will you go from here? What are your future plans?
Mike: We’re doing a US tour in April and May, and then in the Fall we’re heading over to Europe.
Kev: The European tour is being arranged as we speak. We’re just going to worship Satan and…
Josh: Yeah, we have a few more rites to do before we can terminate the rotation of the Earth and bring about the heat death.
Is that going to be soon?
Josh: In a few million years. We’re eternal so it doesn’t matter to us really. We’ve been here forever.
Is there anything else that you guys want to talk about that I didn’t bring up?
Kev: We’ve got snappy new T-shirts.
Josh: Just buy our new record. It came out today.
Kev: Yeah, we’ll give you a sticker.
Josh: Not necessarily.
Kev: All right, maybe not.
Josh: Just buy our record and see what happens to you.
